Anyone have good recommendations for photo collage software? I need to make two collages from a collection of scanned images, adding some text and art, and then getting the resulting images printed (at a nearby drug store kiosk). I’m probably looking at 12x16 sized images, or at least 8x10.
I’ve taken a quick look online and found a few places, but haven’t looked closely enough to see if they allow a lot of design flexibility and the ability to export the resulting image for use outside the software. I’m willing to pay for the software if it is above and beyond what you get from the free sites.
Irfanview is a free photo editing program with a panoramic utility that lets you join multiple images horizontally and vertically and save the image as a regular photo file (jpg, tiff, whatever). You can add text to it as well. I don’t know how much flexibility it has design-wise, or how it deals with different-size images, but it’s probably worth a try.
(If you do try it, click “Image” in the menu when the program opens up and you’ll see “Create panorama image…”)
Panorama images aren’t going to work. My GF said she’s going to use the Wallgreen’s site that allows her to create and print a collage so I think that’s what we’re going to do. I just hope it lets us save the final image for our own use later on, but I suspect it’s only kept on their servers.
Some nice free stuff from Serif
I think it’s the scrap book software that has collage stuff.
When printing at Walgreens.com, you can often get free or 1/2 off 8x10 collages. I get the coupons e-mailed to me on a regular basis. The editing on their site is limited.
Any reason you can’t do it in Powerpoint? Just make sure that you have a large slide size to begin with and then save as PPT and then as a JPG. You can always resize and play with resolution with the files if you’ve saved them.
Picasa has a pretty good collage tool. I use it all the time.Here are some examples.
The thing about free collage software is that if you stand back far enough, the images collectively spell out CHEAPSKATE.