Shape Collage 2.0
Monday, December 1st, 2008
Shape Collage 2.0 has been released!
A lot of new features have been added in this release, so many that I skipped version 1.1 and went right to 2.0 
. As before, Shape Collage automatically creates beautiful looking photo collages in any shape you want with just a few mouse clicks in under a minute and is free for personal use!
These are the big highlights in this release:
- Photo box
- Drag and drop photos into the photo box to add photos for the collage
- Remove photos from the box that you don’t want in the collage
- Faster
- Improved rendering procedures means that your collage gets made faster
- Multithreaded for even more speed with multi-core systems
- Better layouts
- Improved algorithm for placing photos in the collage
- More customization
- Change the font and add symbols for text shape collages
- Use a photo as the background
- Change the colour and size of the photo borders
Shape Collage 2.0 Release Notes
Dec. 1, 2008
New Features
- Added drag and drop capabilities to add photos for the collage
- Added ability to choose which photos appear in the collage via the photo drop box
- Added ability to rotate the photos in the photo drop box
- Added option to select a background colour or photo
- Added option to change the colour and size of the photo borders
- Added a preview image of the photo with its border
- Added option to change the font and style for text shapes
- Added a character map to easily add symbols for text shapes
- The size of the collage and photos can now be specified in units of pixels, inches, cm, or font size
- Multithreaded for increased speed
Enhancements
- The “Watch layout animation” option now comes into effect immediately, even if the layout is currently occurring
- The Exif orientation metadata tag in jpeg images is now read and used to appropriately rotate the photos
- Improved layout creation so that the photos stay within the bounds of the shape
- Extended the “jagged boundary” option to all the different collage shapes
- Added support for GIF images in collages
- Increased performance with images with non-sRGB color profiles
- Improved image resizing quality
- Reduced the memory requirement of saving as a PSD, so extremely large collages can be created when saving as a PSD
Interface
- Added a status bar to provide help and info
- Changed the sliders to combined sliders and spinners
- Added a scroll bars on the application for screens with small resolution
- Alerts users when attempting to use a transparent background and saving as a jpeg
- Displays a thumbnail of the custom shape mask on the main interface
- Shows previews of photos and masks when loading images
- Added a file menu items for executing tasks
Bugs
- Fixed a bug in writing RLE images in PSD
- Fixed the anti-aliasing of photo edges in JDK 1.5
- Fixed a divide by zero error in the layout
- Fixed a numerical stability error in the layout
- Safely handles custom masks of size 0
- Safely handles images that cannot be properly read
- Correctly determines the appropriate size of the photo for the layout
