Shape Collage

Shape Collage takes your digital photos and creates an artistic collage from them. It's easy to use: Just drag a set of photos into the Shape Collage window and specify the shape of the collage that you want to make.

You can choose from among some simple shapes, such as a circle or a heart, or you can stamp out a collage from text. The Custom option lets you build a shaped collage from a photo (images with extreme contrast, like pure black and white, work best). You can even just sketch a shape to collage with the built-in paint program.

Shape Collage is easy to use and the results are so cool that you'll probably get addicted (as I did) to making lots of collages based on shapes and pictures just to see how they turn out.

Note: This software is free, but the author accepts donations through his Web site.

--Dave Johnson