How to make a collage is not as tricky as one might think. It’s in fact very simple with most photo editing software. It just takes a little time and patience and even basic photo editing software that usually come with the purchase of a digital camera or printer. A very good photo editing software is PhotoShop Elements and older versions of it, which are entirely fine, often come included with a new digital camera, printer or scanner.

Photoshop Elements 2.0 is the software which teaches how to make a collage used for step by step guide. The basic steps in making a collage are simple as the first step would be to open a blank document in your photo editing software. Your blank document should be the size you desire your finished photo collage to be, example, 8x10 and of a resolution of 300 for good printing quality. Next select 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. Just Open them and drag them into your blank document.

Next step of how to make a collage is to resize the pictures as necessary and holding down the shift key as you drag from a corner to resize the picture, holding the shift key will maintain 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 of 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 as 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 and for this we use the eraser tool. Better to choose your eraser tool and the size you want based on the size of your pictures. You desire 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 which 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. These are some initial steps of how to make a collage.