Shape Collage 2.5
Shape Collage 2.5 has been released!
Shape Collage is used by people from all over the world and has now been translated into Deutsch, English, Español, Français, Italiano, Magyar, Nederlands, ภาษาไทย, 中文 (简体), 中文 (繁體), 日本語, and 한국어 thanks to Helmut, Hardy, Coco, Michele, Zityi, Huberto, Anchan, Annie, Miso, and JaeHyung!
If you would like to help translate Shape Collage into another language, please send an email to support@shapecollage.com
With this release, creating collages is even faster than before! Shape Collage 2.5 is up to 100X faster for collages with hundreds or thousands of photos! Also, as requested, more preset shapes have been included in the program and a shape gallery has been created. Several bugs have been squashed in this release and additional helpful warnings have been added, such as when you have inadvertently used settings that would result in a ginormous collage too big to fit on your computer.
Shape Collage continues to be free for personal use and allows you to automatically create beautiful looking photo collages in any shape you want with just a few mouse clicks, but for advanced and commercial users, we introduce Shape Collage Pro, which adds advanced features over the existing free version and permits the use of the software for commercial purposes. The “Pro” version lets you save and load projects so you can save all the photos used for a particular collage along with all the program settings and load them at a later time. Shape Collage Pro also lets you save collages in Adobe Photoshop PSD file format where each photo is in its own layer, allowing you to open up the collage in an external image editing program such as Photoshop or GIMP and manually move photos around, change the ordering of the photos, change the size of the photos, apply filters, etc. Purchasing Shape Collage Pro supports the development of the program so that we can continue to bring new features and improvements to the program (there are still many more to come!). There will be free upgrades to future versions, so you will gain access to these new features when they become available by purchasing now!
This is what you get with Shape Collage Pro:
No watermarks
- Make beautiful collages that you can print out in high resolution
Save as Adobe Photoshop PSD file
- Move photos manually in Photoshop or GIMP
Save and Load Projects
- Save all your photos and settings for later
- Create collage templates
Commercial License
- Create collages to complement your photography business
Free upgrades
- Future upgrades are free
Support the development of Shape Collage
Shape Collage 2.5 Release Notes
Aug. 12, 2009
New Features
- Translated into Deutsch, English, Español, Français, Italiano, Magyar, Nederlands, ภาษาไทย, 中文 (简体), 中文 (繁體), 日本語, 한국어
- Added additional preset shapes
- Added the ability to save and load projects
Enhancements
- Faster algorithm (a lot faster for lots of photos)
- Resizable window
- Improved performance when adding custom masks and background photos
Bugs
- Fixed bug with PSD files so that they can now be opened in GIMP 2.5 and later
- Fixed bug with the drop shadow not changing after previewing the collage
- Better handling of collages where some photos could not be read
- Added warning when attempting to create extremely large collages
- Fixed bug when the photo size is set larger than the collage size
- The thumbnail views of the custom shape and background photo now properly show the whole thumbnail
September 17th, 2009 at 6:35 am
Congratulations to the new version. i hoped to hear from you a long time because of the translation into german. looks like you find another person.
greets
September 28th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
Hi,
great stuff, but I can’t figure out how to create a collage where the images stay original size… want to print the result, so I guess not enlarging images or not going down in size is the best way to keep the images as sharp as possible and retaining original image quality. how do I do that
???
September 28th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
If you want to print the collage, you can achieve the best result by specifying the size that you want to print the collage directly into the Shape Collage program and it will calculate the best resolution for you. In most cases, you do not want the individual images to be their original size in the collage because then the collage will end up being extremely large (like several feet wide if you were to print it out). Choosing the appropriate size within Shape Collage will give you the best result for whatever size that you want to print.
December 15th, 2009 at 1:47 am
Hi, can i build a collage into a file about 2 feet square that I can take to a photo shop and have printed onto canvas as ‘wall art’??
Thanks.
December 15th, 2009 at 1:49 am
You definitely can! I just did one myself a few days ago. Just set the “Collage Size” to be 24″ x 24″ and Shape Collage will create an image file that you can print at photo quality resolution at any print shop.
December 16th, 2009 at 11:35 pm
Hi – is there a demo version of photoshop available just for editing the collage? I don’t have any need for a full Photoshop version plus I can’t afford it.
December 16th, 2009 at 11:46 pm
Try GIMP (http://gimp.org/). It is an excellent free alternative to Photoshop and it works perfectly with Shape Collage!
January 31st, 2010 at 6:22 am
I downloaded the demo and was amazed by the functionality – great work Vincent! I purchased the Pro version straight away.
The only feature that I would like to see in Pro is the ability to save all of the image locations when saving a project file – I’d like to be able to parse the output file. Any chance of this being added as future feature?
Otherwise, I’m very happy with my purchase and would recommend that everybody buys this great software!
January 31st, 2010 at 12:21 pm
When you save a “project” with the Pro version, it does indeed save all the image locations. It saves it in XML format, which you can edit in any text editor and then later import into the program.
February 5th, 2010 at 2:51 pm
Sorry for the confusion, I meant the position of each image on the collage (co-ordinates) so that I can make an image-map.
February 5th, 2010 at 2:58 pm
I intend on adding the image locations into the project files in the next version as well as having an option to generate an html file with an image map, as with the online and facebook versions.
February 21st, 2010 at 12:12 am
Any plans to add integration with Apple’s media browser? All my pictures are in Aperture on a second disk, and I can’t figure out how to get them into your program without exporting versions first (which is really inconvenient). If I could see the media browser in the add photo dialog there wouldn’t be a problem.
February 21st, 2010 at 12:59 am
You can try dragging and dropping directly from Aperture into Shape Collage, but if that doesn’t work, then unfortunately, the only option is to export the images to JPGs. The problem is that there are so many different RAW image file formats that it is very difficult to support them.
June 30th, 2010 at 3:54 pm
great work Vincent!