Make a Photo Collage

Here's a great way to showcase and share pictures from a special occasion.

Dave Johnson

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Feature: Make a Photo Collage

As the saying goes, everyone loves a parade. And a photo collage is a veritable parade of photos--which probably explains why I get so many e-mails from readers asking about the best way to make their own. A collage is easy to make, and it's a great way to showcase and share a collection of pictures from a special occasion. This week, let's use Jasc Paint Shop Pro to demonstrate a fast way to make your own collage.

Create a Blank Canvas

Since a collage is just a collection of photos arranged on a page, we'll need to start with a blank page. You can make your collage small enough to e-mail or large enough to print. Let's create this one big enough to print nicely on an inkjet printer.

Choose File, New. When you see the New Image dialog box, specify a size of 8.5 by 11 inches. Since Paint Shop Pro needs to know how many pixels to put in this blank page, set the resolution to 200 pixels per inch. That will create an image that's 1700 by 2200 pixels. Leave the image color set to white and click OK.

If your color is set to anything but white, click the image-color box, use your eyedropper to select the white square from the color grid, then click OK.

You should now have a blank white canvas, ready to be populated with pictures.

Find a Picture

Now we're ready to start adding stuff. Find a photo that you want to add to your collage and open it in Paint Shop Pro. I've discovered that using Paint Shop Pro's Browse mode makes this easy. Choose File, Browse, and then locate a picture in the Browse window. Click and drag the picture from the Browse window onto your canvas; this opens the image file.

Feel free to tweak the picture; you might want to run One Step Photo Fix from the Enhance Photo button in the toolbar, for instance, or correct the color and exposure manually. While you're working on it, use the Crop tool to resize the picture as you see fit. (The tool lives in the third cubby from the top of the toolbar on the left side of the screen.) At this point, your workspace might look something like mine.

Paste It Into the Collage

Now it's time to insert your first photo into the collage page. Click the picture to select it, then choose Edit, Copy to put the picture in the clipboard. Then switch to the blank canvas and choose Edit, Paste, Paste As New Layer. The picture should appear on the blank page. However, it's entirely possible that the new image will completely fill or be too big for the page. That's fine; we'll fix that in a moment.

First, select the Move tool, which you can find in the fourth cubby in the toolbar. It looks like a four-way arrow. After you select it, click in the picture you just pasted and drag it until you can see the bottom-right corner of the picture.

We want to see the bottom-right corner so we can use the resizing handle that will appear there in a moment. To get the resizing handle, select the Deform tool from the second cubby. It shares that cramped little space with three other tools, so you may need to choose it from the drop-down menu. When you have the Deform tool selected, you should see sizing handles appear all around the new image.

Move the mouse over the bottom-right corner of the picture. Don't click and drag; if you do that, you'll distort the picture by changing its aspect ratio. Instead, right-click the sizing handle and then drag it while you hold the right mouse button down. This sounds odd, I know. But you need to do this to make your image the desired size and keep the aspect ratio intact. Then left-click anywhere inside the photo and drag it to position it on the page.

More of the Same

Now that you've positioned the first picture in your collage, adding more is a piece of cake. You can use this technique to add any number of images, give them unique sizes and positions, and make your collage as visually interesting as you like. Pictures can overlap or have white borders, like mine--it's all up to you.

Dave's Favorites: Digital Photo Tips for Educators

My, how times change. When I was in high school, I used my dad's old Super-8 movie camera to make a short documentary about the Bayonne Bridge, which links Bayonne, New Jersey with Staten Island, New York. At the time, it was both the world's longest steel arch suspension bridge and right down the street from my house. Digital photography wasn't invented yet.

These days, teachers are incorporating digital photography into the classroom to support all kinds of activities: documenting class trips, creating reports, sprucing up presentations, serving as the springboard for language-arts projects, and adding photographic evidence to science projects.

The Oswego City School District in Oswego, New York, has created a cool little Web site that's chock full of advice for using digital photography in the classroom. Here you'll find sample projects, links to digital camera lessons, and even information about academic standards and benchmarks. If you're a parent or an educator, be sure to check out the site.

Q&A: More Questions About JPEG Compression

Like many people, I have a lot of old slides and negatives that I need to scan into my computer, and I usually do this in such a way that a 35mm slide ends up as a digital image with about 3000 pixels on the long side. I'm saving these scanned images as JPEG files because they take up much less space on my computer than TIFF files, but I'm not sure if that's the best format for recovering and storing the maximum available detail from the original. Do I lose pixels to compression when I scan to a JPEG, or do I only lose pixels when I resave a JPEG?

--Graham Jacks, Hamilton, Ontario

That's a good question, Graham. Saving your scanned photos as JPEGs really will save a huge amount of space: A single TIFF at the resolutions you're scanning can require several dozen megabytes, while an equivalent JPEG might be just a couple.

But your question misses the mark just a bit. JPEG compression never makes you lose pixels. No matter how many times you resave a JPEG or how much compression you use, you'll always have exactly the same number of pixels in your picture. Instead, the problem involves color accuracy: File compression introduces color glitches and other visual errors into the picture.

For most people, though, all this is just academic: If you save your JPEGs at the very highest quality level, you can avoid visible compression defects in your images and get TIFF-like results. That said, the first time you create a JPEG image, it loses some color accuracy to the compression process. Then, every time you resave a JPEG, the file is recompressed, further reducing the image quality. That's why, if I were in your shoes, I'd always set my software to save (and resave) your JPEGs at the very highest image quality.

Hot Pic of the Week

Get published, get famous! Each week, we select our favorite reader-submitted photo based on creativity, originality, and technique. Every month, the best of the weekly winners gets a prize valued at between $15 and $50.

Here's how to enter: Send us your photograph in JPEG format, at a resolution no higher than 640 by 480 pixels. Entries at higher resolutions will be immediately disqualified. If necessary, use an image editing program to reduce the file size of your image before e-mailing it to us. Include the title of your photo along with a short description and how you photographed it. Don't forget to send your name, e-mail address, and postal address. Before entering, please read the full description of the contest rules and regulations.

This Week's Hot Pic: "Jocelyn," by Linda Crusie, Beacon, New York

Linda says that she took this picture of her daughter after she fell from a snow tube and crashed into the snow. She took the picture with a Canon PowerShot S50 and made no changes to the image except for a contrast enhancement.