I started a story, "Strand Island", Chapter 2 up. And a question about photos

[Lion]

I'm encouraged by the polls so far. So I put the first installment of the story up. It's on

http://strandisland.blogspot.com/

Hope you will like it. Let me know what you think and if you want more. Please keep taking the polls if you haven't. There will also be "behind the scenes" posts.

Who do you think survived this celebrity plane crash?

[Edit] Now the Chapter 2 is up. And a blooper post too. The site is also reorganized.

[Ellatrue]

Your story needs MOAR JOHNNY DEPP.

[Liz]

Heh, don't all stories?

[Lion]

I have a question about photo manipulation. Do you know any free software to make a photo collage, such as this one that came with Uni:

.

I don't think paint or IrfanView can do it, can they? The difficult part is to cut a photo into a shape other than rectangle.

[Simsbaby]

Gimp should be able to do that easily. It's free and fairly simple to use. Paint.NET might also be helpful.
Gimp
Paint.NET

[Lion]

Thank you very much. I'll go check them out.

[Gwill]

Come on, you can do that in Paintbrush.

[Emma]

Shift and drag with the eraser, paintbrush or pencil will draw straight lines. If I can do it anyone can. I have no skillz of an artist.

[Lion]

Come on, you can do that in Paintbrush.

How? Do you mind elaborating a little bit?

Shift and drag with the eraser, paintbrush or pencil will draw straight lines. If I can do it anyone can. I have no skillz of an artist.

I can draw straight lines, but only on one picture. How do you cut along those lines is the question here.

[Zazazu]

Bah, it's a pain in the ass. ARR! yourself something, or use that GIMP thing. I use an old version of Adobe Photoshop 6.0. Draw auto shape, select outside, delete layer below (the one with the photo in it). Repeat for other portions, then paste all into the same new file and smoosh around until it's right. Any program that allows you to use layers should allow you to do it that way.

[Lion]

Thanks Zazazu. I thought I was crazy. The Paint.NET is working for me. Hallelujah!! 

[J. M. Pescado]

I can draw straight lines, but only on one picture. How do you cut along those lines is the question here.

Use a white fat linebrush, erasing, and copypasta.

[Gwill]

Come on, you can do that in Paintbrush.

How? Do you mind elaborating a little bit?

Cut out, copy and paste, then draw white lines on the seams.
If you can't manage that in paintbrush I don't see that a more advanced tool is going to make it any less complicated.

[Sivany]

Paintbrush makes it quite hard to cut out anything other than rectangles though. You'd have to have a steady hand in order to use the freeform cut tool when it came to pasting in the last picture. Using layers in Photoshop make that bit much easier.

[Ellatrue]

Also, it will copy the white background. This is problematic.