How to Make a Digital Photo Collage with Corel Paintshop Photo Pro

Make a digital photo collage of your favorite sporting activities

You can use Corel's PaintShop Photo Pro to combine a series of your photos into a digital collage. Once completed, you have many options for its use. For example, you can send it to a digital print shop, print it with your printer and frame it, or use it as your computer's desktop wallpaper. You could also upload it to a social networking website, share it with your friends and colleagues, and tag the people in the photographs.

Difficulty:

Moderately Challenging

Instructions

Things You'll Need

• Corel Paint Shop Pro
• Digital pictures

1. Launch Corel PaintShop Photo Pro. Select "New" from the "File" menu. Change Units to "inches" and Resolution to "300." Enter the width and height of your finished project. For example, for a poster you could enter "20" for width and "16" for height. Select "Raster Background" and "RGB - 8 bits/channel." Select the "Transparent" checkbox and then select "OK."

2. Select "Open" from the "File" menu. Browse to the first picture you wish to include in your collage. Select it and click "Open."

3. Select the "Crop" tool from the Tools toolbar. Select one of the presets or "free form" from the drop-down that appears on your photo. To rotate the selection, click on "Rotate Crop Rectangle" on the small toolbar below the cropped selection of your photo. Drag the selected cropped area to get the portion of the photo that you want and click the green arrow on the crop toolbar.

4. Select "Select All" from the "Selections" menu. Select "Copy" from the "Edit" menu. Return focus to your new collage photo. If necessary, select it from the "Window" menu.

5. Select the "Move Tool" and then select "Paste as New Layer" from the "Edit" menu. With the "Move Tool" selected, drag the photo to your desired location. Switch back to the original photo and close it without saving any changes. Save your collage photo as a native PaintShop Pro image, e.g., collage.pspimage.

6. Open additional photos, copying and pasting them as new layers until done. Save your work after the addition of each new photo. If you have left spaces between photos in you collage, select the original layer from the Layers palette. Select the "Flood Fill Tool" and then a color for the foreground in the Materials palette. Click anywhere on your collage photo.

7. Select "Export" from the "File" menu. Select "JPEG Optimizer" from the fly out menu. On the "Quality" tab, set compression value to "1" and then click "OK." Navigate to the location you wish to save the final picture. Optionally, you can print directly from the PaintShop Pro image using "Print" from the File menu.

Tips & Warnings

• If the original photo does not have the same resolution, i.e., 300 dots per inch, as your photo collage, you may need to select the size from the Resize option of the Image menu. Do not try to increase the resolution of your original photos, as this will distort your photo.

• The size of your collage will be limited to the amount of memory you have available on your computer. The 20- by 16-inch example described requires approximately 112MB of memory. Corel recommends that you should have at least two to three times the value displayed in the Memory Required field in the New Image dialog box

References

• Corel PaintShop Photo Pro X3 Help: Creating Images