If you've been reading RootsWorks, you've been seeing a lot of information about pictures. We've covered cameras, basic photography, scanning, and related subjects. Today we'd like to talk about something fun that builds on those skills: making collages.

You've seen collage picture frames in the stores; they have different sized holes in the mat so that you can put in pictures of your children playing soccer or riding ponies. With prints, it's easy to do—you just get a stack of prints and a big frame and go for it. You could even make your own mat if you got creative, by buying a sheet of mat paper, cutting out holes for the photos, and assembling it all in a frame.

Digital collages are the same way. You get a big frame and then you put in your pictures. Here are ten steps to make your own.

1. Choose your photos. It's hard to get the big picture until you have some idea what photos to use. There are several points to consider:

- Try to find a theme for the set of pictures—maybe they are the same person at different ages, maybe they're all from the same party. Maybe they're all people holding puppies.

- The larger pictures will go behind the smaller pictures. That's right—put them right on top of each other.

- You don't have to use the whole photo. You can crop it to get a particular section of it for the collage, or you can cut a person, leaf, or kitten out of one, and put it on the others.

2. Plan your layout. You can change the layout of your pictures easily—but it helps to have an idea what you want to do. You might lay out prints, if you have them, or sketch out the collage on paper. Give some thought to the following questions:

- Do you want the pictures to touch each other, or to have a little space between them?

- Do you want to draw a little frame around some of the pictures?

- Do you want a colored “halo” around some of them?

3. Open a new file. This file is your “big frame.” It needs to be larger than the pictures, so they will fit into it. You can fill the image with a background color, a background image, or even a gradient, but remember that this is the background.

4. Open the photos you want to use. You could open them one at a time or all at once. I like to open them all at once. If your computer runs out of memory, don't worry. Buy a new computer and start over.

5. Copy each picture and paste it into the frame. Use the move tool or a free transform to resize, rotate, and position each photo. Two thoughts to keep in mind are:

- Layers make it easy to move one picture at a time. You might have to move a picture to the front or the back to get the effect you want, but don't flatten the picture until you are finished.

- Transparency. Do you want to be able to see through some pictures? Play with the transparency (sometimes called “opacity”) to experiment with different effects.

6. Lasso objects. If you want to cut a person out of a photo, you have a number of choices. My current favorite is to use the magnetic lasso tool. Sometimes I try the magic tool for variety. Zoom in so that you can see what you are doing.

7. Drag them around. One of the great things about using a computer is that you can drag the pictures around. You might need to view the Layers window to do this. (That's where you set the transparency, too.)

8. Save your file often. You don't want to have something happen and lose your work.

9. When you have the picture the way you like it, flatten the layers and save it as jpg.

10. For April Fools, I like to put pictures of my friends into other pictures. It's sort of like the way that Forrest Gump was in pictures with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. If you do a good job on the lasso, and the two pictures have similar light, you can usually get someone into the picture and have it look okay. Resize, rotate, crop here and there, and you've got pictures of your friends sitting with you at lunch.

What Software Does This?
I like to use Adobe's Photoshop Elements 2.0. It's capable of doing all 10 steps, it costs $99, and I've already learned how to use it. If you don't meet that description, you might think about a program like CollageMaker from Galleria Software. It's $25, and you don't have to know how big to make your file sizes, anything about layers, and the rest. It makes nice haloes, but you can't do the translucent effects with it. There are free trials for both programs.

If you have PowerPoint and aren't interested in either of the others, it's a great program for making collages. You can paste in photos, resize and drag them, and crop them. (You can't rotate them.) When you're done, you can save the file as a JPG, print it, or animate it and let it run in a loop at a family reunion.

More Information
For links and more information about scanning, please see the RootsWorks site. If you want to discuss your scanning challenges, please drop by the RootsWorks Forums. Registration is free, and I'd be interested to know what kinds of issues you are facing.

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