Cherish the Moments...Custom Digital Photo Collages!

Photographs are blended together to create a unique custom display. Any type of photograph is suitable and can be edited. Backgrounds or people can be completely removed if necessary. Perfect for a themed collage or to simply commemorate a person's life and memories.

A Block Photo Collage is a symetrical style collage.
Squares of various sized are created to frame the
photographs. This style can be done with or without the borders around and in-between the photographs. With or without wording as well.

Nine (9) close up shots of your precious baby's face. Capture all those cherished faces!

When planning a photo collage, think about the final product. What is the story you are telling? Is it the story of a fabulous trip you took? Perhaps it is the story of your wedding day? Or, the story of someone's life or marriage? Try to keep the story that will be shown in the photo collage in mind when selecting your photographs.

Try to choose pictures that have special meaning. The photographs should have a clear focal point, be it a person or an object. Be selective and choose the best photographs that portray the theme.

Picture to avoid would include a photograph where a person's head is too close to the edge or even cut off slightly. Out of focus or seriously damaged photographs should be avoided as well. Keep in mind background can be removed and blended, but working with using a picture where the main focal point is cut off is much more difficult and can take away from the final result.

As an example of selecting photographs, take a wedding day photo collage. A common theme is to choose all couple pictures. Choose the best of the posed pictures, including one with the bride and groom kissing. A picture of the exchange of vows, cutting the cake, the first dance, champagne toast, waving goodbye in the car, and any other special couple moment from the day.

It can be difficult to narrow down the choices when you have many great photographs. Being selective helps to keep the photo collage theme visible and clear. Every photograph will have a chance to shine and together, the custom photo collage will make a perfect piece of custom art for your home.

Photoshop Elements is the software I have used for my step by step guide, How to Make a Photo Collage.

The basic steps in making a collage are simple. The first step would be to open a blank document in your photo editing software. Your blank document should be the size you want your finished photo collage to be, example, 8x10 and of a resolution of 300 for good printing quality.

Next choose your pictures, keep it to about 10 pictures or less to begin with, till you are used to working with a lot of pictures so as not to be overwhelmed. Open them and drag them into your blank document.

Next resize the pictures as necessary. A tip, hold down the shift key as you drag from a corner to resize the picture, holding the shift key will keep the proportions of the picture so as not to distort the image. You can resize back bigger or smaller as needed as you work to decide the layout o the photo collage. Move the pictures around to see what looks letter where, try to create some balance, perhaps choose a focal picture to place in the middle and be larger than the others. But the focus does not have to always be in the middle, see what works best with the pictures you are using.

Now comes the most difficult part, the blending. For this we use the eraser tool. Choose your eraser tool and the size you want based on the size of your pictures. You want a blurred edge eraser for better blending. Erase the hard edge on each picture first then one by one, blend into each other, resizing the pictures where necessary. This is not something that can be taught, you have to just jump in and try it, if you make a mistake you can always delete the layer of that picture and open the picture again and drag it back in and try again. Use the step backward tool as well to undo any mistakes when you can.

You've made a photo collage, time to look around and make any final touches and adjustments. Save your document as a PSD, the default Photoshop Elements file type and then save it again as a jpeg so you can print and share it.

For a step by step guide, visit
How to Make a Photo Collage