How to create a diptych to display your photography

Mmm Boiled peanuts. These delicious treats can be found all over the South. From roadside stands selling hot bags of them to a standard items at college football tailgates, late summer and fall is boiled peanut season. For the recipe you can head over to Taylor Tailgates Today I am going to use these boiled peanuts as an example to show you how to create a diptych.

If you have been following Taylor Takes a Taste, you probably have noticed I love using diptychs and triptychs to display my images. Having two photos side by side is a great way to convey a message that one photo can’t do by itself. It is a very useful way to show contrast between two subjects, before and after effects of a process, or two different views of one subject.

For today’s example, I decided to use a diptych to show the before and after of boiling peanuts.

This is the before image. It shows the green (raw peanuts) before they are cooked.

This is the final image of the peanuts after they have been boiled. While these images are string on their own, putting them side by side is a more effective way of showing the cooking process. If you are blogging with you images, creating a diptych will also save space.

To make a diptych you first must plan out your image and decide on what you want your border to be. This involves a little math, but don’t worry it is very simple.

First you need to know your final image size.

I am going to use my blog’s format as an example but feel free to substitute your own numbers. All horizontal images on my blog are 90o pixels x600 pixels. When making a border, you will have 4 sides. The top, bottom, left, and right. You need to decide what you wants those to be. For my diptychs I have done this.

I have a border of 30pixels on both the top and the bottom. These means that for my new image height I will have to subtract 60 (30 + 30) from the original height. You have to remember to account for BOTH the top and the bottom. This gives gives us 600-60=540 as our new image height.

For the left and right, I decided that I wanted a border of 45pixels.

To get our new image width we have to subtract 90 from 900. Remember we have to account for both the left and the right so its 45+45=90 that we subtract. 900-90=810, so this is our new image width. When we put this all together, we get.

Our new image size of 810×540. When creating a diptych with two vertical images, we will resize those images to our new height of 540. Again, you can use whatever number work for your blog or final output size, but remember to account for bot the top and bottom when figuring out the height and the left and right when figuring out the width.

Now that you know what your dimensions are. Time to make the diptych. Instead of writing it out, I found it was easier to show you. Here is a video of how I made this diptych.

If you have never used diptychs before I hope you give them a try! They are a fun way of displaying your work.