Here is the final of my collage. This was difficult. When I sat back down to work on the final collage from the draft I kept coming across different technical issues that made me so frustrated that I completely started over with my project to produce my final.

Most of the comments I received on my rough draft were about the bottom right two photos looking as if they were blended together and about how the text was getting lost in the photos.

One of the most noticeable things that I did with the photos was switch out a few of them. I took out the two photos that appeared to be blending together and replaced with another significant photo from the ceremony. Also, I couldn’t find the family photo that I had originally used so I used another one that I found on my hard drive.

One of the biggest issues I had with editing the draft was setting the borders. I created the stroke layer style in one of the photos and thought that copying and pasting would apply to all of the images the same. Once I did this to all of the photos all of the borders ended up being different sized. I realized that I had forgotten that I had used my DSLR camera, so the photos were high resolution and were going to give me a headache when it came to sizing. So the collage actually looked worse once I applied the inside stroke. To fix this, when I created the new final version I placed the photo over the placement holder before I added the clipping mask to make sure I had close to the size that I needed. After this I had to go through each individual picture and adjust the inside stroke size so that it looked like the border was the same distance all around the edges. I think I did a pretty good job with hiding the fact that they aren’t all the same size. This was probably the most frustrating part about the entire collage. I still haven’t found the solution to getting the stroke in the photos in the middle to touch all borders.

I received a few comments about the text and how it was blending into the background so I added gradient overlay, outer glow and a few other layer effects to make the words stand out a bit more than they were before. Now I am happy with the way the text and photos stand out.