easy and elegant

TurboCollage is my first choice to make several styles of attractive photo collages. I don’t remember it ever crashing or glitching. There are some collages for which I have to resort to Photoshop, but that’s a lot more work involving layer masks.

I do have a wish list that would bring TurboCollage from great to even greater:
1. Rulers and optional snapping. To line up up text or circles with other things (like other text) I have to place a physical ruler on my computer screen, but that’s not as precise or easy as I would like.
2. The ability to define text styles. If I have several text items on a collage and decide to change something about their style, there’s no way to change them all at once. I can’t even precisely make them all the same new size, because TurboCollage doesn’t show you numerically how big text is.
3. The combined rotate/zoom control in some collage styles like Regular Pile and Circle Pile is hard to use. I frequently change one when I only wanted to change the other, and it takes a lot of fiddling to get the result I want. Separate controls would be much easier.
4. The ability to change picture aspect ratio (cropping). In the Regular Pile and Circle Pile styles, the pictures are stuck at their original shapes, although you can zoom and pan within that. Sometimes I have to make a specially cropped version of a picture externally just for use in a TurboCollage collage so it doesn’t cover up part of another picture, and changing the stacking order would just make a different picture cover up too much. Being able to push the borders around in the non-pile styles as well would also be handy, though I suspect harder to implement.
5. Soft edges. It would add to the program’s versatility if it had the ability to cross-fade the edges of one photo into another or into the background. This is one of the cases where I have to use Photoshop.
6. In addition to the Shuffle button, or augmenting it with a drop-down control, buttons to sort the pictures by file name or date stamp (from EXIF tags, or file modification time if there are none). That would have avoided a lot of manual re-ordering of pictures in some of my collages.

djmnet about TurboCollage - Collage Creator