My kids have this really cool book of Marvel heroes where you can mix and match them by turning the head, body, and legs separately. I thought it would be pretty awesome to make our own during summer camp at my workplace.

Step 1: Take the Photos

So I don't have photos for you but I can hopefully explain it well enough that you wont need them. You need all the pictures to be relatively the same size and in the same place. So I marked the feet placement with two Xs of masking tape on the floor. Then I had a volunteer stand there so I could position the camera on the tripod at the correct distance away to get the full body in the frame. If the photo taking process will take more than one day, mark the tripod placement with tape as well. Then start taking the pictures. Have the subjects pose however they want, but learn from my woes and make sure the arms and hands aren't higher than the neck or lower than the waist, I had them no higher than the shoulders but forgot about the waist part and it looks funny later when you flip and a person has 2 sets of hands.

Step 2: Painful Alignments

Again no photos... *note to self: whenever you plan to do something awesome... take pictures!!!* So now we need everyone's neck and waist to line up as best it can. In photoshop open a new 8.5 x 11 document, then open one of the photos, select all and drag it over to the blank page, use free transform to make any size adjustments, click to view rulers, and pull down guidelines that run through the neck and the waist. Save the photo. Then click to hide the layer that contains the photo and open the next photo. Select all and drag it over to the page with the guidelines. Then use free transform to adjust the size so that the guidelines pass through the neck and waist. When you have the guidelines in the right place turn the hidden layer back on, then off, and on again while you compare the neck position of the two. Use the move tool on the new layer to nudge the picture so that the two align as best they can. When you are satisified, delete the first layer and save the photo ****be sure to click "save as" and title it something different than the first or you will save over the first one***** Then repeat it with the next picture. Continue until all pictures have been done.

Step 3: Photoshop Fun!!!

So I didn't like the boring white background of my photos and some didn't line up right after the size adjustments so I decided to make my backgrounds. In Photoshop, I carefully selected the person, clicked select inverse and deleted the background. Create a new layer and move it under the layer with the person. Then play around with all the fun colors and gradients and stamps and filters to make fun backgrounds. Save each one as you finish as a jpeg file so you can print them later. You could make one background for all so they all line up or a totally different one for each to make it more awesome.

Step 4: Make the Book

Now we must print the photos. Print them on thick paper like cardstock. When they are all printed we get to the tricky part. We must now cut the photos at the neck and the waist so we have 3 pieces for each photo and we have to use a book binding machine to punch the holes for the spiral binding. I cut the photos first and it was really hard to do the hole punching part so I would recommend punching the holes first and then cutting and then binding. The machine we had was easy. Just insert the photos and pull the handle to punch the holes. Then use a paper cutter to measure and cut each photo. For mine I believe the neck was cut off at 4 inches and the waist at 7, but of course this may be different for you. Once you have all the photos cut into 3 pieces and stacked so that the matching pieces are together, insert them on the binging ring. Then close the ring and you have an awesome book to play around with. Very entertaining!