Collage like a pro!
With our brand new, custom made collaging tool!
We’ve been hard at work making an online tool for you to use to put your collage pages together – there’ll be no more waiting around in our design queues during our busy season, and you can make as many changes to your pages as you need to make sure they’re perfect for print. So once you’ve added your collage sections, you’ll notice a placeholder in the book preview. To start working on the collage itself, click into the section you want to edit and click the layout collage button as indicated below 
The next screen you see will be the design screen and you can play around with the layout of your collage, add additional pictures, add titles and do all sorts of cool things! When the collage is generated, it takes the form of an empty grid but you can alter this in many ways. We have a selection of grids that you can use if your simply looking to build collages quickly and you can view these by clicking on random grid.
Now here’s the fun part! The blue arrow shows you how you can find and locate pictures uploaded to your yearbook. You’ll notice the gallery bar shows some pictures already- these are the last 50 photos added to the book but you can also use the drop down menus to search for other images too By clicking onto an image in this gallery, you can drag and drop the pictures onto the page.
What else can I do?
Having the freedom to design your own collages is great but chances are you’ll be wanting more than just a grid of pictures on a page. We’ve given you all these options to play with too:
1- Add Frame -Need more photos per page? Simply click on the add frame button to add extra photo frames to the collages.
2- Add Text– you can title your pages here with a wide range of fonts, and pick a colour scheme to match the rest of your book. For the moment we only support single line text, so you needn’t write an essay – just a quick catchy title will do! :p
3- Shuffle– Quickly switches the images from frame to frame so you can view possible layouts with no fuss!
4- Scramble!– Puts all of your frames at a jaunty angle so the images appear scattered on the page.
5- Undo– Let’s you go back and undo the last change you made to the collage. Click this as many times as you need to
6- Redo– Reverses any action you’ve undone!
If you click onto an image in your collage you’ll notice a little image options box appear as well as the blue handles that appear on the image itself. Use these handles to resize orrotate the frame, move the pic around within it, zoom in and out etc.
The grey ‘image options’ box allows you to play around with things like border colour,spacing between frames and frame rotation too, so have a play around and see what you can put together – if you find something you like, apply it to all frames in the collage using the ‘=’ button
~ The Pick up pic button is great for swapping photos from one frame to another – often an easier way to rearrange your page than resizing every frame separately – just move an image to a frame that’s already the right shape!
FINALLY, please take note of the Resolution setting at the bottom of the Image options box – this is key to getting a really high quality collage – Ideal resolution is 300dpi but if this number is less than 150dpi, the picture isn’t particularly high quality, and we’d suggest it is either made small on the page, or replaced with a better image – PLEASE ask us for help with this if you’re not sure, as it can make a huge difference to your printed book.