Photoshop Elements 8 for Mac: The Missing Manual

Chapter 15. Creating Projects

If you’re into making scrapbooks, greeting cards, or other photo concoctions, Elements is perfect for you. You can dress up your pictures in all sorts of creative ways without any other software. Elements is crammed with add-on graphics, frames, and other special effects. You can even create multipage documents and basic PDF slideshows.

This chapter kicks off with an in-depth look at how to create a photo collage. Once you have those steps under your belt, all the other projects (summarized starting on The Favorites Panel) use the same basic method.

Note

You can also create online galleries (photo-filled web pages) in Elements. You’ll learn all about them in Chapter 17.

Photo Collages

The Create tab helps you make fancy pages featuring your photos, which you can share as either printouts or digital files. Although Elements gives you lots of preset layouts to start from, you can customize every aspect of them to create projects that are totally your own.

A photo collage is a page displaying one or more of your photos, with or without a themed background. (Flip ahead to Figure 15-3 to get a glimpse of what Elements can help you do.) Elements presents you with a series of guided questions that lead you from start to finish. All the collage styles begin with one or more suggested photo placeholders, but you can add or remove photos at will. You can also change the background, frame styles, and other details.

Note

Photo collages, like all the printable projects ...