A bunch of Polaroid photos are lying on a table and form a collage of a single image. The web-to-print template looks as if all the Polaroids are positioned in a way that makes each photo part of a bigger puzzle.

Before you start

• Add a page frame (Layout/Page Setup/Add Page Frame). This will create a rectangular shape with the exact same size as the paper size of your web to print template and place it as a bottom layer.
• Draw the basic Polariod shape out of two rectangles, one for the frame and one for the photo area and convert them to curves (Ctrl+Q).

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In a nutshell, we are going to weld the visible photo areas of each Polaroid into a single curve and use it as a PowerClip container for a single variable image.

Copy the Polaroid shapes as many times as you wish positioning and rotating them randomly along the way.

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The result should be similar to this.

PowerClip

First we need to create the shape that will be the PowerClip container.

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Lets start of by changing the color of the photo area for better orientation like in this example.

What you see in blue is the shape that we should end up with as the PowerClip container.

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To achieve this you need to cut out the frames that are overlapping the photo areas leaving each photo area shaped exactly as in the last preview.

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For example, the highlighted frame in this preview goes over two photo areas of Polaroids under it.

Duplicate the frame (Ctr+C/Ctrl+V), select the copy along with one of the photo areas underneath and click on Back Minus Front icon in the top bar.

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You should end up with a photo area shaped like this.

Duplicate the top frame again and cut it out (Back Minus Front) from the other photo area as well.

Repeat this step with all other frames.

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After you’ve finished cutting all the photo areas, select them all and click on Weld icon in the top bar to weld them together into a single curve.

We now have the PowerClip container shape.

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Placing the image inside the PowerClip

Import the image that you will use as the content of the PowerClip and turn it into a variable image field.

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Place it inside the photo area curve as a PowerClip (Effects/PowerClip/Place Inside Container).

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The result should be similar to this.

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Drop shadows

Lets add a small drop shadow to Polaroid frames.

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Select one of the frames, activate the Drop Shadow tool from the toolbox menu on the left and click-drag on the frame to get a small bottom-right drop shadow.

Repeat this step to all the frames.

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As you can see, the Polaroid frame shadows go over the other frames but not over the photo areas since the photo area PowerClip shape is on top of all other objects.

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To drop shadows on the photo areas we need to draw parts of the frame manually, place them on top of the PowerClip container object and drop shadows from them.

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Activate the Pen Tool from the toolbox menu on the left and draw the parts of the frame that are needed to drop the same bottom-right shadow on the photo area.

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The blue parts are the added frame parts.

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Drop bottom-right shadows from them just like you did with the full frames earlier.

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The new shadows will probably overlap with the full frame shadows as well as drop shadows where it is not needed.

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To fix this we need to separate the drop shadow from the object (Right click/ Break Drop Shadow group apart) and delete the frame parts and the shadow parts that we don’t need.

Note. An easy way to do this is to use the Pen Tool to draw a shape that you can use to trim the shadow shape with.

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The result should be similar to this.

Final touch

You can place some wood grain texture as a background to give an illusion of photos sitting on desktop.

Also, how about adding a variable text frame on the white text space of the Polaroid frames?

We used Hans Hand handwriting font in this example.

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The result should be similar to this.

All done!

Our web-to-print software can handle this effect easily! Upload the template into your catalog and test it.

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Try this web-to-print template.

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Download the FREE CorelDRAW template file.

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This technique was inspired bu the Polaroids Photoshop tutorial at photoshopessentials.com