If you are looking for a simple convenient graphics editor to process your digital photos, try Collage Maker. It has tolls for fast and high-quality work.

It is known, that all graphics editors could be divided into two groups – professional editors and editors for home use.

Professional editors allow performing practically all operations on images. But they have some disadvantages: these editors are quite complex to use, and it requires special skills. Besides, size of the installation files of these programs is usually rather big, and price is high. Professional graphics editors are applied for solving professional complex tasks of image processing in publishing houses, studios, and the like.

Graphics editors for home use usually purpose the following goal: to give easy-to-use tools for quick convenient way to get good results. Therefore the number of available tools is greatly reduced: only those operations kept which might be required. That’s why the size of installation files is typically small. Additionally, such editors have mostly low price, because it is not necessary to pay for features which are unlikely to be used. Graphics editors for home use are optimal solution for creating private photo galleries.

The good example of simple, but powerful enough graphics editor for home use is Collage Maker.

Let’s discuss its features.

First, Collage Maker has a simple easy-to-use interface. It includes convenient operations, so that anybody can create good-quality collages of his/her photos.

Thus, Collage Maker has many tools to process photos. They include various effects (Colorize, Grayscale Effect, Negative Effect, etc.). Collection of masks is also rather convenient tool, and it allows to change edges of photos on collages. Crop tool and other operations can be also applied to photos.

For text objects the following properties can be set: font, font size, fill type (solid fill, gradient or image from the big collection), halo, shadow, rotation angle, etc.

As a background solid and gradient fill types or an image from the collection may be used:

Moreover, Collage Maker has a very interesting feature that I like the most – stamps. Stamp is a small image without background (for example, picture of balloon), that can be “imprinted” in different parts of a collage.

One more convenient feature of Collage Maker is that when creating new collage one may set standard dimensions of photos (such as 3” x 5”, 4” x 6”, etc.) and resolution. This feature helps to prepare a collage for printing.

Saving collages to disk may be of two types. You may save a collage in special program collage file (*.clg) to have possibility for further editing of separate objects of the collage. Or you may choose to save your collage as graphics file (bmp, jpg or gif).

As I mentioned above, it is very easy to make collages with Colage Maker. I have created my first collage in less than 10 minutes:

But if anything in the program is unclear, look in a detailed help of Collage Maker.

One of the disadvantages of the program is that sometimes one error message appears (at least, it happens in version 2.01). But this error is not critical and appears only in one particular rarely-used place, therefore it does not interfere with process of designing collages.

Then, the program does not keep such information as recently opened files, and every time you want to edit one of your collages you have to browse hard disk. Additionally, there are no drawing tools (such as pencil, brush, eraser, etc.), and operations in Collage Maker can be performed only for entire objects (photos, background, texts, stamps). But this agrees with the description for the program, and, to say the truth, the available tools are quite enough.

Shareware version of Collage Maker can be used for 30 days almost without limitations. Registration of the program costs $27.95. Since Collage Maker might become your universal graphics editor for creating family photo albums, I think it is worth the money.

Collage Maker keywords: collage, graphics, editor, photo, seamless, mask, arrange, assemble, border