Print Pilot – Photo Collage Program

Print Pilot – God’s gift to Image people: review by Trevelyan Beard

Miracles come my way every now and then. I remember when I first got Adobe Premier to work without crashing – that was one miracle. Then there was the time I came across a new HP 1215 colour printer for $150 (being sold because of the new model change). That was another.

The latest miracle has been finding Print Pilot and I’m telling you, I’m tickled to death with this program. Take a look at the illustration in this article – it tells far more clearly what the program can do. But let’s go through the latest job of work I had to do and you will catch on.

The project was to make a letter size picture of my six grand children plus mum and dad and Gramps (me). I think they call it a collage when you snip bits and pieces and paste them all together as one picture. What resources did I have? Well, I had a collection of snaps taken in one day when we visited the museum. They were all group shots, none of them single portraits. I was also in a hurry meaning little time to learn any fancy, high priced image programs. This family lives in the US so I cannot get full-face snaps without a long delay. How to use a bunch of group snaps and make them into an interesting collage? That’s the project.

If you think you can take any of the regular imaging programs and do this, you are absolutely wrong. Print Pilot is the only one out of many that I looked into that will do this job. With Photoshop, maybe, if you can pay the price and learn it in the time available.

But on with the nitty gritty!

I had about seven group snaps and what I wanted to do was to extract single faces from each and paste these as a collage. Bring up Print Pilot. Then drag in several of the group snaps from your source in Windows Explorer and place these snaps in the screen space around one of the group snaps.

Crop a face from one of the snaps, pull it to enlarge, rotate if needed and drag it to a position on the main snapshot. Take another group snap and pick another face and do the same thing, dragging it to a position. You soon have the original group snap with inserts all over it. Finally insert text wherever you wish. Doctor it up to suit and now print.

The result is fantastic. Now take copies and distribute to your friends. They’ll love it.

I’ve had more fun with this program than any other. And the price is right.

Download and enjoy a free trial. If you like it, it’s $25.95 US from Colorpilot.com. If you don’t like the price, you can continue forever with the program but put up with a little nag notice on the bottom of each print. It’s fairly innocuous. You can’t lose.

 

– Print Pilot main page –