14 DAY TRIAL // Photo collections aren’t good just to be stored and browsing them for a certain picture (to add to a new social network account) every once in a while, or slideshow them in times of melancholy. They can be put to good use by making collages out of them. What are these good for? Well, presents mostly for the dear ones, but presentations, portfolios or simply show your skills with computers are good enough reasons to start screening the images.
If you decide to create a collage with real images you risk getting your fingers glued together (if you’re like me), so try the digital approach, it is cheaper, and you can dump the end result to the bin if you don’t like it and start a new project. There are plenty of alternatives on the market, but you have to pay for most of them. CollageIt on the other hand requires no payment and involves no limitations because the application is free of charge.
We installed it with no bumps or unexpected stops for opting out of some toolbar or service that is not required for the program to function at normal parameters. The interface is as simple as can be; it lays right from the beginning the steps you need to go through in order to make your piece of photo art. Three stages are necessary to complete your project, plus the adjustments you want to carry out so that everything complies with your visual standards and the project is to your taste: add the pictures, make the collage settings and preview the fine art you’ve put together and then save the entire thing to a location of your choice.
Main application window is split into three main categories: Photo List which holds all the images you want to glue in the project, the preview pane and the section with the layout options. In the lower part of the screen you will find options for modifying the background, saving the current layout and the entire project.
So the learning curve is smooth and the operation should go with no problems. Layout options are the most important ones in the program because they let you handle the way the pictures in the collage are arranged. These allow you to select the number of photos to be used. Unfortunately you don’t get to pick the ones to be included and CollageIt will decide on this randomly.
More aesthetic-related settings at your disposal include defining the space between the elements of the collage and the items and the margin of the “canvas”. These values can be very easily set either by entering the numbers yourself or by dragging by a slider to the appropriate value. To check out the new modifications you can generate a new preview.
CollageIt can automatically rotate all the images in the project so that you don’t have to, but you control the rotation degree. This is done just like in the case of space adjustment, either by dragging by the slider or typing in the value yourself. Choosing zero rotation angle will align all the pictures to a grid.
Leaving large amount of space between the images in the collage can be done by setting sparse values. Other options available under “Layout” let you enable shadow dropping around the image and adding a frame to them.
More customization settings available in the application deal with page setup and personalizing the background on which the images are pinned. Thus you can define the size of the collage and orientation (and the options are abundant), while for background choice you can pick the color fill: solid or gradient. If plain colors are not your thing, you can cheer up the collage by pasting an image as background. CollageIt provides a hefty set of patterns to pick from but you can also bring your own picture if you want.
To make the creation of future collages easier the application permits you to save the layout on your computer. It would be nice if this would be automatically stored in the installation folder of the program, so that everything is in one place and does not run the risk of getting lost.
CollageIt puts at your disposal an easy way to create picture collages of all sizes. However, it does not provide the possibility to arrange them into shapes of any sort. Moreover, all the items composing the collage are randomly arranged and you do not have the possibility to pick the order yourself. On the bright side, the range of popular formats supported includes JPG, BMP, TIF, PNG and GIF.
Also, fitting the pictures into some shapes would be quite plus in the program, just like storing layouts in a place the app can access automatically, instead of letting the user browse the system. Also, you cannot pick which images can be used in the collage. This article is also available in Spanish: Haz collages con tus fotos en un par de clics Follow me on Twitter @Ionut_Ilascu
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