Simone (pronounced Simon) over at Great Fun 4 Kids did a post on Photoscape, a picture manipulation and collage program. It’s free. It’s GREAT!! I love it and want to tell my readers about it, too.


Here is the download link, Photoscape.












My granddaughter did some painting on birdhouses as a little summer craft so I thought I’d combine showing how she painted the little houses and also show what this program, Photoscape, can do.

Photoscape has all the usual picture manipulation stuff like lightening, sharpening, resizing, etc. but then it has cool stuff, too.

 You can manipulate the pictures.
It can change this…



to this:



It can change this:



to this dimensional look.



I wanted to add one other effect that I haven't seen in other programs. It makes a cube out of a picture. See? It looks three dimensional. Cool. As we used to say in the 60's, "Cool, man".














You can add icons
(little hearts, butterflies, cartoons, etc. which are right in the program).



You can add frames to your pictures.
This is a frame. Beautiful. There are all kinds of conventional frames, too.



Isn’t that cool? You’ll see how I put that in the collages to spice them up.
All right, you get the idea that you can manipulate a picture in Photoscape, but the best is yet to come.

It’s the best program I’ve found for collages without getting into a difficult program like Photoshop. I’ve heard a lot about Picmonkey which is only fair in my estimation. It can’t do nearly what Photoscape can do. I work with Live Writer which I love for doing blog posts but it does not have the abilities to do collages to the extent that Photoscape does.  Does it sound like I’m thrilled with this program? Yep. Last night I thoroughly went through the program and then created these collages. Now that I know how to do them, it will be a snap!!

You can make Collages, lots of different kinds of collages.

Don’t you just love that?
Here is a collage form for 2 pictures. There are others.



You just drag and drop your photos into the collage forms.
Here are a few more collage forms that are drag and drop ready.







The combinations are endless.  Here is a collage using the ragged frame pictures. I love this look.



When you drag and drop the pictures into the slots,




This next one is my favorite: You can put pictures from an entire craft session into one collage.



You can add text.
That is a huge thing for me and for bloggers in general. Why do these letters look a little blurry? Hmm.



Here is a collage that contains all the pictures (most of them) for a crafting session.
Isn't it nice? AND it is labeled with text.


















Here is an artsy one;



If you need a few pointers, give me a shout. I’ve gone through the whole program. It’s not difficult but, like anything, you need to learn it. I learned it quickly, believe it or not, so that tells you how simple and learnable it is!! It didn’t make me want to pull my hair out either.  :)

Happy Summer crafting




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