Easel's sizing and tiling tools provide quick and easy methods to help you arrange multiple images. You will probably find them more useful for starting rather than finishing arrangments, and most useful when working with a large number of images (say 20+). See auto arrange for info about completely automated arrangements.
All of the S&T tools are grouped together on a 3-tabbed window, accessed by selecting Tools/Sizing and Tiling Tools on the main menu, or by clicking the sizing and tiling icon on the toolbar. Tool capabilities include 3 size equalization techniques, size distribution, and automated layout that can iteratively resize and tile in search of the best fit.
If any images are selected when the you open the S&T window , all S&T tools offer the option of working only on selected images. If none are selected, the tools work on all images in the composition.
The tools on the Equalize Sizes
tab can equalize the areas, widths or heights of all or selected images.
The purpose of equalizing areas is to give each image equal weight in
the composition, while the purpose of equalizing dimensions is to make
them easier to arrange -- when images have equalized dimensions, it's
easy to align them in rows or columns.
Area equalization is the simplest; when Image Areas is selected, Easel will compute and display the total printable area, the number of images, and the unit area for each image. When you click the Equalize button, the images are resized accordingly.
When Image Widths or Image Heights is selected, Easel displays 2 additional settings that affect the results: the Grouping Threshhold, a percentage between 0 and 100, and Method, which can be Adjust Up, Adjust Down, or Average. When you click Equalize, Easel compares the selected dimension of each image to all others, computing the difference as a percentage, and if the difference is less than or equal to the grouping threshhold, flagging it for adjustment. When all images have been checked, those flagged are adjusted as a group per the selected method and resized to match the smallest, largest or group average.
Size distribution is just the opposite of equalization:
it makes images different sizes, in a systematic way. You set two parameters
-- the number of different sizes to create, and the ratio of the smallest
to the largest - click Resize, and Easel generates
the distribution.
Size distribution can come in handy when you have many identically sized pictures and want to create some variety.
The tiling tool rearranges images. The manner in which it does so depends upon several settings, and varies from simple to complex. The settings control sequence, spacing, resizing, and iterations, and their values interact.
For the simplest rearrangment, leave Random Order unchecked and set Number of Interations to 1 and Resizing Method to None. When you then click the Tile button, Easel will arrange the images by stepping through them in the order they were added and, starting at the upper left corner, tile them working across and down with the space between them determined by your current spacing setting. If there is not enough room to fit all of the images, Easel will shrink them all by the same percentage until they do.
If you now check the Random Order box and click Tile, Easel does pretty much the same thing, except that it steps through the images in a random sequence. If your images are all the same size and shape, this will have no effect, but if they vary it will make a difference in the tiling pattern and perhaps the need to shrink things to fit.
Now that you've got Random Order checked, make things more interesting by increasing the number of iterations from 1 to 1000 (to do so, click in the box and type the number), then click Tile. What happens? You won't see it, but Easel will indeed compute the tiling 1000 times, using a different sequence each time. Each time it completes the tiling job, it calculates the percentage of the total area covered with images rather than white space, and when 1000 iterations are complete, it restores the tiling job with the best coverage and tells you what it is. Neat, huh?
Incidentally, you can set the number of iterations greater than 1 without checking the Random Order box, but it's pointless: without randomness (or resizing, discussed next) the outcome of all iterations will be identical.
Easel can combine its resizing and tiling capabilities in the quest for better coverage. It does so by "nesting" iterative tiling inside iterative, randomized resizing. What this means in plain English is that Easel can repeat the resizing process as many times as you want, stepping through the images in a different order each time (which varies the result); after each resize, it steps through the tiling process as many times as you want. Easel computes the coverage ratio for each resize/tile combination and as before, restores the best one when all iterations are complete.
As you would expect, the resulting arrangements are influenced by the resizing method selected, with those produced by equalization having similarly sized images and those produced by distribution more of a range. There is enough randomness in the iterations, however, to make the results less disparate than you might expect.
I was going to say that it's usually easier to manually finish up an equalized version, because of the similarity of image sizes. However, when I ran through the example below, I discovered that Easel's precision alignment tool obliterated any difference -- when using it, getting rid of the rough edges took 10 minutes in both cases.
Note: When Easel performs resizing and tiling together, it uses the current resizing settings (eg Adjust Method for equalization, Number of Sizes for distribution), even though they are not visible on the tiling tab. Don't forget to check the values before clicking Tile.
Now let's run through an example.
To get started, I selected File/New from the main menu, configured the page and clicked OK. Then I clicked the Add Images button on the toolbar and chose 21 images from our recent vacation in the canyonlands. Finally, I rectangle cropped almost all of them to focus on the most interesting portions, and dragged them around on the page, as shown in Figure 1. Then I saved the file.
Tip: Cropping your images before arranging them is a smart thing to do, and Easel makes it an easy thing to do. If you don't crop, a) you end up with a lot of boring background material, and b) your arrangement will be a monotonous affair of similar rectangles. Don't hesitate to crop!
For the first test, I selected Equalize Areas as the resizing method, set the method to Adjust Up, checked Random Order, and specified 20 resizing and 5000 tiling iterations. I clicked the Set Spacing... button and set both horizontal and vertical spacing to 4 pixels. When I clicked Tile, the 100,000 iterations took a minute or so, with the result shown in Figure 2:
Before changing the resize method to Distribute, I reloaded the original file (to make the results more comparable), then set 8 as the number of sizes to create and 4 as the ratio of largest to smallest. After the same number of iterations, the results were as shown in Figure 3:
Both results had 85% coverage, up 25 points from the original, but there are more differences than just equalized vs. distributed sizes.. The distributed sizes do a better job filling the space horizontally between the margins because, during the tiling iterations, Easel is more likely to locate images that fit better at the end of each row. On the other hand, the equalized sizes leave noticeably smaller gaps in between the images. Thus they have equal amounts of white space, but it is distributed differently.
Just for the fun of it, I decided to see if one or the other was easier to complete, i.e. manually adjust to get rid of the remaining white space. As mentioned above, though, I couldn't detect any difference: Easel's precision alignment tool made short work of both.
The lesson here - I think - is that neither resizing method is inherently superior. The greater variety of image sizes makes for a generally more interesting composition, but giving all images equal weight may better suit your purposes. You decide.