Click on any phrase to play the video from that point.
[♪♪] [lynda.com presents]
[excerpt from: Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 for Windows - Essential Training with Jan Kabili]
[Kabili] One of the photo projects that's available in Photoshop Elements
is photo collage.
You can create a photo collage using a variety of themes, backgrounds,
frames, graphics, and text effects that come with Elements,
and you can customize all of those items to make your collage unique to you
and your photos. [Watch Photoshop Elements 7 Essential Training at www.lynda.com/pse7]
I'm working here in the 1302 photo collage subfolder in the chapter 13 exercise files.
I'm going to make a collage from these 6 photos of carousel horses.
The first step is to select the 6 photos in the Organizer.
I'll click on the first, hold down the Shift key, and click on the last.
Then I'm going to go to the Create tab at the top of the Task pane.
Select that, and from the list of photo projects I'm going to choose Photo Collage.
That opens the Editor to the Projects workspace,
with instructions about how to create a photo collage
and the 6 photos that I selected here in the Project Bin.
The first step is to select a size for the collage.
Be sure to select a size that your printer can print
and for which you have photo paper.
I'm going to stick with the standard letter size.
The next step is to choose a theme for the collage.
A theme is a combination of background and frame for each of the pictures in the collage.
I'm going to really get wacky and choose this Broadway theme.
There is a preview of the theme.
Once I've seen it, I'll click the X to close the preview.
Then I'm going to move down to choose a layout for each page in the collage.
I'm going to choose a layout that has a place for 3 pictures on each page.
And I'll close its preview.
I'll come down to the Additional Options area
where I'm going to make sure there's a check box next to Auto Fill with Project Bin Photos.
That will cause Elements to take all of the photos in the Project Bin
and use them to automatically fill in the frames in the collage.
I don't have any captions on these particular photos,
so I'll leave Include Captions unchecked.
But if you had created captions earlier for each photo,
that would be a way of getting text into the collage.
I can type a number of pages into this field. I'll leave it set to 2 to make a 2-page collage.
And then I'm going to click Done.
That causes Elements to create the collage for me.
And if I come over to the document window, I can click on the controller
at the bottom of the window to see the two different pages,
with that nice page curl effect in between.
I'm going to go back to the first page to do some editing
because this red theme just doesn't suit my taste.
To edit the collage, I'm going to go to the Artwork workspace
by clicking Artwork here in the right column.
That opens the Content palette.
The Content palette offers all kinds of options for me to edit my photo collage.
If I click on this menu on the right, I can see what's here in the Content palette.
Backgrounds, frames, graphics, shapes, text, and themes.
I'm going to start by changing out the background of this image.
So first I'll go to the document window and click in the background,
and then I'm coming back to that menu in the Content palette
and I'm going to choose Backgrounds.
Now I can see a number of backgrounds to choose from here in this area.
If I scroll down, I see that there are lots of them here.
And actually, I've looked at these in advance and I've chosen some that I really like
and dragged them down into the Favorites palette here.
So the way that you do that is you select a background that you like
and then you just drag.
Once a piece of artwork is here in the Favorites palette,
I can apply it to other photo collages as well.
To change out the background of page 1 of this collage,
all I have to do is select the background that I want to use
and click Apply at the bottom of the Favorites palette.
And that changes the background.
Now let's say I want to change the frames on each of these photos.
I'll select one of the photos, and then I could come up to the Content palette,
click on this menu, choose Frames, and select from any of the frames that are here.
And there are lots of them.
I already picked one and put it in my Favorites palette,
so I'll use that one by selecting it and then clicking Apply
to change the frame on one of the photos, and I'll do the same on the second photo.
Select the photo, select the frame, click Apply,
and on the third photo on this page the same.
I can also add graphics and text to this page.
Let's see how to add text.
I'm going to click on the background, and then I'm going to go up to the menu again
to the text area to see that there are many different text effects here to choose from.
I already chose this rose-colored embossed text effect,
so I'm going to use that one from my Favorites palette.
I'll select that effect, and then I'm going to click Apply.
And you can see that text has appeared here in the middle of the image.
When you do this the first time, this text box may be very small,
but it will be there directly in the middle of the image.
The trick then is to select that text box and move it.
I'm going to click off of it to eliminate the highlight on the text,
and then I'm going to click on it and drag down to the bottom of the image.
I can resize the text by clicking on any of the anchor points and dragging.
I could rotate the text box, and I can change the text.
Obviously, I don't want it to say "Your Text Here,"
so I'm going to double click inside the text box to select the text and type my own text.
And then I'll click off of it to accept that change.
And now I can just move that into place.
I also can move any of the photos.
So I could click on this photo and drag it out.
I could make a photo bigger by clicking on its corner anchor point and dragging
and then clicking the green check box to accept that change.
I can rotate a photo.
So if I select this one, I'll then move my cursor over a corner anchor point
and I'll turn the photo and click the green check box.
I can also change the content of any frame, replacing one of these photos with another one.
So let's say I want to replace this front photo.
I'll select it, and then I'm going down to the menu at the top of the Project Bin,
clicking and choosing Show Files from Organizer,
and that will show all 6 of the files that I had originally selected in the Organizer
for this collage.
I'm going to click on the last one and drag it up into this frame and release,
and that replaces the photo in the frame.
Notice that there is now a controller above that frame
which I can use to change the size of the picture inside the frame.
And then I'll click the green check box.
Remember that all of the changes that I made here are only made to page 1 of this collage.
Page 2 still has the Broadway theme applied,
but I could come in and do the same thing here.
For now I'm just going to leave things as they are.
I'll go back to page 1, and I'm going to save my collage by going to the File menu
at the top of the screen and choosing Save.
I'll save it into the default folder, the Pictures folder,
and I'm going to name it collage.
And notice that this is being saved in a special photo project format, .PSE.
Remember to save it in this format so that you can reopen the project at any time
for some more editing, applying different backgrounds, frames, graphics, text, or themes.
I'm going to include it in the Organizer, and I'm going to click Save.
I could have made a collage from scratch
using the skills that I've been teaching you in this course,
but it certainly saves time to use the automatic features in this photo collage project,
and there are so many opportunities to customize
that it really feels like I've created a unique collage.
[Watch Photoshop Elements 7 Essential Training at www.lynda.com/pse7]
