Open some photos in the Editor or select them in the Organizer.

This step is optional, but if you preselect photos, Elements can automatically place them into your layout for you, if you like.

Go to Create → Projects → Photo Collage.

If you start from the Organizer, Elements bounces you over to the Editor to create your collage. The pane shown in Figure 15-1 appears.

Choose your page size from the Page Size pull-down menu.

If you don’t like the measurement units listed in the Page Size menu, you can change them. Go to Edit → Preferences → Units & Rulers → Photo Project Units, and change the Photo Project Units setting to inches, centimeters, or whichever system you prefer.

From the “Choose a Theme” section, if you want, select a theme.

Themes give you coordinated backgrounds and frames for your photos. (You can always choose a different background later if you don’t like the one that comes with the frame, or a new frame to replace the one that comes with the background.) Click once on a theme to select it, and a larger thumbnail appears, giving you a closer look at your choice.

If you choose a theme and then decide you don’t want any theme at all, click the upper-left thumbnail in the list of thumbnails to choose No Theme. If you go theme-less, you just get a blank background, but you can always add backgrounds from the Content palette later.

Choose a Layout style.

Scroll through the thumbnails and click the one you like. You can rearrange your layout after you’ve chosen it: Add more photos, remove photos, rotate the images, and so on. The layouts are arranged from one picture per page at the start of the list, to many pictures at the bottom of the group.

Choose from the Additional Options, if you like.

If you leave “Auto-Fill with Project Bin Photos” turned on, the pictures you chose in the Organizer automatically appear in your collage when Elements creates it. If you want to determine which photos go into which slots in the layout yourself, turn off the checkbox.

Figure 15-1. Once you’re in the Create pane in the Editor, you have a choice of two tabs (circled). Select and start your project from the Projects tab. Here you see the Photo Collage pane, where you start your collage. Once you’ve completed your basic layout here, click the Artwork tab to see the Content palette—that’s where you can choose frames, graphics and other doodads to add to your project.

There’s also a checkbox for having captions you’ve added to your photos appear in the collage. (You can add text or edit the captions later, so you’re not tied to what’s in the Caption field.) This checkbox is grayed out if you haven’t selected any photos with captions.

If you selected some photos before you started, the “Number of Pages” box tells you how many pages long your creation will be. This number updates to reflect your current Layout choice. So, for example, if you select three photos in the Organizer and choose a single photo per page, the number of pages is three. If you click a layout that uses three photos per page, the number of pages changes to one. (If you haven’t selected any photos yet, you can specify how many pages you want by typing in a number.)

When you’ve made all your choices, click Done.

Elements gets to work creating your collage. If you preselected photos and left autofill turned on, Elements puts your photos right into the frames for you. Your document will have as many pages as needed to place all your photos in the layout you chose. If you didn’t select any photos, you see “Click here to add photo or Drag photo here.” That’s fine, because you can add photos in the next step.

Adjust your photos.

If you haven’t already picked photos for your project, click a frame and then choose a photo from the dialog box that appears, or drag a photo from the Project bin to a frame.

Regardless of how you get photos into the collage, you can make a number of adjustments to them once they’re in. Click once to resize the frame, or double-click any photo and you see the controls shown in Figure 15-2, which let you make a number of different photo tweaks without changing the frame size. Click the green checkmark to apply your changes, or the red Cancel button to get rid of them.

Figure 15-2. When you double-click a photo, you get controls for adjusting it. To resize your picture, move the slider to the left (smaller) or right (larger). Rotate your photo by clicking the blue rectangles (next to the slider), or click the folder icon to choose a different photo. You can also drag a handle of the bounding box to resize your photo or do a manual rotation, just the way you’d use the Move tool (The Move tool).

You can also change the frame style by clicking over to the Artwork tab, clicking a photo in your collage, and then choosing a new style from the Content palette (The Content Palette). To change to the new frame, double-click the new style, or drag it to the photo. You can also click it once and then click Apply.

Customize your collage.

Here’s the fun part. Click a photo in your collage and drag it into a different position. Drag in art from the Content palette. These graphics are vector images (Ellipse), which means they’ll look great no matter how big or small you resize them. You can also add text to your collage (find out how to do that in Chapter 14). You can change the background by selecting a new one in the Content palette (The Content Palette). You can even flatten your image and use filters on the entire page. Figure 15-3 shows an example of what you can do with a Photo Collage.

If you click back to the Editor, you can use any tool or filter on your collage, but you may need to simplify a layer (Ellipse) or flatten your image first, so save that step till you’re sure you like your collage. You can use the Move tool to rearrange your collage layers after you simplify them, but once you simplify layers, you can’t make their contents larger than 100 percent without losing quality, just like any normal photo.

Save your collage.

When finished, press Ctrl+S to name your project and save it. You can save it in any standard file format if it’s a one-page collage, but if you have more than one page you must save it as a PSE file, which is a special format just for multipage Elements documents.

If you want, choose your photos.

If you want Elements to automatically layout your photos in the book, make sure you have them open in the Project bin and in the correct order before you start. Or if you prefer, you can wait and add each picture manually after you create the book layout.

Start your book.

In either the Editor or the Organizer, go to Create → Photo Book. Elements switches over to the Editor, if you aren’t there already, and presents your first set of choices for your book.

Choose a title page photo.

Photo books usually have a cutout cover through which you can see one large image on the title page. This page has a different layout from the rest of the book. If you’re using photos in the Project bin, drag the photo you want for the title page so that it’s the first photo in the lineup. If you prefer, you can wait and choose your title page photo after you complete the book layout.

Click Next to go to the next pane.

Choose a layout and theme for your book.

You have two choices:

Now choose a theme. When you click a thumbnail in the theme list, Elements takes a few seconds, and then displays a little thumbnail showing the selected theme’s style.

Your other choices are the same as for a Photo Collage. “Number of Pages” says 20 when you start your Photo Book; you need to have between 20 and 80 pages for a book. If you choose a number outside that range, you’ll get a warning. (You don’t have to enter a number here, incidentally, if you don’t feel like counting. If you have more photos than will fit on 20 pages, the number of pages updates automatically.)

Create your book.

Click Create, and Elements creates and opens a PSE file for you. You can edit anything in the file, exactly the same way you can change things in a Photo Collage. Once Elements creates the book, you see it, along with some special controls for navigating through the layout, as explained in Figure 15-8. The bright aqua lines towards the boundaries of the pages are the printing guides—they mark the actual page edges, so anything outside them will be cut off when your book is printed. Pay attention to them when moving or resizing your photos.

Figure 15-8. When you click Create, Elements gives you a helpful double-page view of your book so that you can make any edits to the pictures or changes to the layout. The control strip shown here lets you move through your pages to see each double-page spread, or add or remove pages. You can reposition it anywhere in the work area that’s convenient so it doesn’t cover up your photos.