Picture Collage Maker Pro 3

You can make collages out of your digital photos for free using Windows Photo Gallery or Picasa, so why would you download a whole app just for this activity? Because Picture Collage Maker Pro ($39.90) goes far beyond those free apps with a wealth of templates, clip art, frames, and backgrounds to help you produce something really unique and impressive. A free 15-day trial version is available, and a Mac version of the non-Pro version costs $29.90 and commercial single-user licenses run $30 more for each.

Interface
Picture Collage's interface feels a bit dated, but it's very functional, flexible, and a pleasure to work in. Drag-and-drop is supported wherever you'd want it, as is live resizing and rotating of any objects in your design by dragging on controls. When you first run Picture Collage Maker, a small dialog box presents you with four button options: Create Blank Collage, Template Collage Wizard, Create From Template, and Grid Collage Wizard.

To start with, I chose Blank. The next step is to choose dimensions, resolution (DPI), and orientation for your collage. You can choose from 18 commonly needed preset sizes or just enter your own custom dimensions. Next you're taken to the main interface, with its three panel view for your document in the center, a left panel for templates, backgrounds, photos, masks, frames, clipart and shapes, and a right-panel for page and layer navigation. Along the top is a tool button bar for standard file actions like new, open, save, along with more design-oriented choices like Template, Collage, Add photos, Share (or print), and Wizard. You can customize all the program's panels and toolbars, including just what you need.

The template collage wizard is the easiest way to set about creating your memory document. You start by adding photos from your hard drive or connected memory media?you can even add a whole folder at once. Then you choose a template: there are 117 templates in four categories, including calendars, greeting cards, layouts (photo jumbles and grids), and photo albums. You can also download more templates, or create your own. After choosing a template, you simply hit Finish.

All the control you get with arranging your visual creation comes in at this point. You can change the background and add frames, clipart, or shapes. There's a generous selection of frame styles?138 in all, including classic old-picture style frames, wood, and hanging postcard styles. The 114 backgrounds range from wallpaper to textures to greeting card styles, and you can use your own image if you like. But there's no option to melt the photos together with feathered edges the way you can with Windows Photo Gallery, and no Polaroid borders like those in Picasa.

Generous, too are the 151 clip art choices, with speech bubbles, numbers and letters, cartoon objects, flowers, and holiday imagery. Shapes include arrows, lines, rectangles, circles, hexagons, and crosses. These can all be stretched and transformed to taste, using control points.

Text options are there but somewhat limited. You can add text from fonts on your system, resize it, stretch it, and rotate it. You can even add a drop shadow. But there's no stroke feature to highlight characters, and you can't wrap text around a curve, the way you can in Photoshop Elements. Picture Collage Maker's text also isn't WYSIWYG?you can't type on the collage, just in a text dialog box.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/pYf7HThl210/0,2817,2410250,00.asp

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