I'm trying to create a simple collage with PE3, and am finding it much more difficult than I think it ought to be. I'm hoping that someone will point out something stupid I'm doing.

I want to print about 15 to 18 pictures on a single letter-size sheet. These photos will have been cropped (so they don't have a fixed size) and I want to place and size them as I see fit. They will overlap -- there is very little, if any, background visible. This is an iterative process, so I'll be resizing and moving photos multiple times. PaintshopPro has a Print Layout function which allows me to do this, although it's certainly not perfect.

From what I can gather, to do this in PE3 the conventional wisdom is to start with a blank document and add the photos on separate layers. I did this. However, I found two problems, one an annoyance, and the other a deal-killer, in my opinion.

The first problem is that when I resize using the move/transform control, it doesn't maintain the aspect ratio unless I hold down the shift key. As far as I can tell, there's no way to make that the default behavior. Once you start resizing, then it will let you lock the aspect ratio. I can't tell you how many times I screwed this up. I know several ways to recover (which I've used many times), but I don't understand why this is the default behavior.

The second, more serious problem, is that apparently when you resize a photo on a layer to a smaller size, it really does resample the picture and make it smaller. If you then resize it to make it bigger, you've lost resolution. This is a very bad thing when I'm constantly moving and resizing photos as I refine the collage. In the collage I worked on last night, as I added each photo, I sized it small so I could see them all on the sheet. Then I made them larger as I placed them. Bad idea.

I know that what I want to do CAN be done, it's just that it appears to me that it is extremely inconvenient in PE3, unless I'm missing something. If I am, I'd sure like to know about it. Otherwise, I guess I'll either use PaintshopPro for printing or try something else (any suggestions?).

Thanks.

Al Brunck

Dave Scott

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Simple Collage in PE 3