FotoJet Collage Maker

You can keep your photo collections nicely stored on your hard drive and all to yourself or you can go creative and arrange them in beautiful collages that you can then share with friends and family.

FotoJet Collage Maker is a tool designed to help you unleash your creativity and turn your dull photo folders into nicely-arranged compositions, posters, comic books, or photo cards in just a few steps and regardless of your skills.

This app offers a balanced combination of ease of use and good-quality output so that anyone can produce stunning collages or other photo compositions just by selecting a template and following the steps of its wizard-based user interface. Thus, the first thing you have to do is to choose a template. The app’s initial window is but a templates menu where you can choose either a classic collate template, a more creative one, or a completely different product, such as a poster or a comic.

Depending on the category you select, you will be offered a different choice of templates, each of them suitable for a certain number of images and for different arrangements. There are more than 800 of them and, unlike in some other similar tools, they’re not completely locked. This extra level of flexibility will allow you to change the sizes of the boxes provided for the images, the background color, etc. As for the photos themselves, the possibilities are even wider.

You can drag and drop your own pictures into the boxes provided and complement them with images stored on the Web. The app comes with a simple search engine that will help you find pictures on the subject of your choice to complete your collage. To make the selected pictures even more appealing, you are provided with some basic editing tools. Thus, you can rotate and mirror your pictures, make them fit the box they’re in or zoom them into highlight a specific area. You can also change their level of transparency and to tweak their exposure values easily with the help of a slider. Finally, you can apply to any or all of them one of the various creative effects provided, giving them a black and white finish, a sepia tone, or a color boost. You can then add text and cliparts to your creation, as well as a decorative background to the page with just one click.

Once your collage, photo card, comic, or poster looks just the way you wanted, you can send it to the printer; share it to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or Tumblr without leaving the app, or save it as an image file for further editing. Here is where FotoJet Collage Maker comes short, as the only two output formats supported are but JPG and PNG, each with its own choice of sizes and quality levels. I won’t say this is a major drawback, but a wider choice of output image formats – such as TIFF, PSD, or BMP – would certainly make this tool more appealing to a wider audience.

FotoJet Collage Maker can easily be love at first sight for a large number of amateur photographers. Its simplicity of use, together with the nicely-crafted profiles it provides, are a sure bet for those who want to go creative without going through the steep learning curve that professional image editors usually demand.