Field guide
Print a collage without soft photos or clipped edges
A collage that looks finished on screen can fail in print because physical size, trimming and source resolution were never part of the layout. Save at a print size from the start and most of that goes away.
01
Know the number before you start. At 300 pixels per inch a ten-inch edge needs roughly three thousand pixels before bleed. The print sizes in the Layout and Save steps are set at 300 pixels per inch — 6 × 4 and 4 × 6 inches at 1,800 by 1,200, 5 × 7 at 1,500 by 2,100, A4 at 2,480 by 3,508 — and the PDF option writes one page at that paper size so it prints without a scaling dialog. The social sizes are 1,080 pixels on the short edge, which prints cleanly to about three and a half inches and is soft past six.
02
Keep faces and borders inside a safe margin. Home printers and commercial cutters can shift slightly, so nothing you care about should sit on the trim line. The outer-edge slider in the Style step is the control that buys that margin.
03
Inspect the lowest-resolution photograph at its placed size. A small source may be acceptable in a small cell even when it cannot support the whole page.
04
Do not print a browser screenshot of the canvas. It adds an uncontrolled scaling step and usually changes colour and sharpness; save the file first and print that.