14 DAY TRIAL // Making collages out of images could be one easy way to create your Christmas cards this year. And there is no shortage of software to help you in this endeavor. Artensoft Photo Collage Maker is a wizard-driven application that takes you through the steps of reaching great looking picture collages.
We’ve experimented in the past with programs like CollageIt but Artensoft Photo Collage Maker is different in that it lets you shape up a predefined image from smaller pictures. The built-in algorithm fits the cell images in such a way that they follow the color and shape patterns of the original picture.
At $79.95 for a personal license and $149.95 for a business one the price of the application is no chump change though. Installation completes quickly and soon you will face a very simple interface created as an actual wizard, to make collaging a job as effortless as possible.
The wizard starts off by requiring you a base image (BMP, PNG, GIF, TIF, JPG), which is the view that has to be constructed from the picture cells. Next is the step where you can add the actual photo galleries that will act as fragments building up the larger picture.
Importing these could take quite some time, but no more than what the software requires to glue them together into one collage. In our case, adding a folder with 325 items took a few minutes to complete. To be more specific, 100 items are indexed in over one minute (~1’17’’).
According to the indications in the application, turning off the preview of indexed items should speed up the process. However, none of our tests showed an improvement in indexing speed with preview thumb off and the time taken to index 100 images remained around the same 1’17’’ value.
I wish I could say that a more powerful system will get the job done faster, but in our case system resource usage was limited to only about 15% CPU and 140MB during this operation.
On the upside, if you do not have a rich enough database of pictures to index, the application makes available two downloadable sets for free. These are collections of various photos, one containing 10692 items and the other 3394.
On the same bright note, once you have added the desired folders they will remain available in the application for future projects. Moving to the next step requires indexing to be either completed or paused.
During our tests we noticed that the option to remove a folder from the list of the locations for cell images does not work. You can choose to include a folder in the mix or not, but the “Remove” button remained greyed out just like the “Save As” option in the unregistered edition.
Also, despite the fact that we removed a folder from its initial location when the application was indexing its content, Artensoft Photo Collage Maker showed an ongoing indexing process.
Once you have added all the cell images you can proceed to the next step in order start creating the collage, which involves more waiting and more intensive usage of system’s resources. CPU value in our case averaged around 68% while RAM reached even 200MB.
There are some settings to be done here, like defining the number of Level 1 blocks you want to be used in the collage. These are used for layering all the cells in quadrants applied to the base image. Through mathematical calculations Artensoft Photo Collage Maker matches the fragments together so as to form the collage, and it does a great job. One stage of this procedure involves cleaning up duplicates that are too close to each other.
Besides defining the number of level 1 blocks and amount of nesting layers (grouping multiple layers into one uniform element) the application also makes available some advanced settings on this page. Unfortunately we could not access them as this action would instantly crash the program forcing us to restart it.
Luckily, even if the program closes (either because you do it or it crashes), you get to pick up from where you left. The base image and database of fragments is preserved, so you will not be set too far back. This is also useful as you can enrich the database without having to worry about indexing new pictures for each project.
The resulting collage will be presented in the interface in an enlarged form that allows you to view the fragments composing it. For an overall look at the resulting image there is the zoom out function to help you. But there is a drawback for this action, too: it is not performed instantly and you will have to wait for Artensoft Photo Collage Maker to resize all the fragments.
However, you are given the chance to make the desired corrections for the output to be to your liking. This means that you can click on a fragment in the collage preview (which is stamped with the developer’s watermark all over) and replace it with items from a list of cell images available in the right hand part of the panel. It is basically a point and click operation so there is nothing to it and it all depends on your artistic vision of the image matchmaking of the software.
The final stage is saving the resulting image, which is not an option for the evaluation version of the program. However, we benefited from a license key from the developer and managed to store the collage. It took a while for the operation to complete, but the output was indeed stunning.
You get to make finer adjustments that include defining the number of level 1 base blocks, nesting layers or changing the cells assigned by the program with other matching ones from a list. We were not able to remove any of the indexed folders as the “Remove” button was unavailable in the evaluation version we tried. The application crashed every time we wanted to access advanced settings in the collage generating screen. The application is currently at version 1.0 and there are plenty of bugs to fix and improvements to be made. However, the major deal breaker for some users may be the price.
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