Surely you’ve run into this before: you’re in a place that you want to show off through some great photos, but the weather is against you. There’s a dull gray sky with no room for creativity. You have a subject that’s interesting, but the rest is boring. In most cases you can make use of tone mapping, gradient filters and the like, but there are also cases where there’s no adjustment that can make the sky look good, and yet something does have to be done with it. There is one last resort—replacing the sky.

No matter whether you want to just place one photo inside another, or create a complicated collage, it’s easy to do in Zoner Photo Studio X. I’ll show you how to create a simple collage in a few clicks and lead you in detail through the process of creating more complex ones. As we’ll see, photo collages have a wide range of uses. You’ll be glad that you’ve learned how to make them.

Adding various objects to a photo isn’t all that complicated, but you do need to adhere to a few guidelines. We’ll walk you through five basic steps that are key to a good photo montage. Master them and your photo montage will look significantly more realistic. In this article, we demonstrate how to add a dragon to the sky, but feel free to start with something more basic.

It’s not entirely a photo and not entirely a video. Looking at a cinemagraph, you get the feeling you’re seeing something magical. Because a part of the picture is in motion, but the rest is photographically frozen. Here we’ll show you what a cinemagraph is and how to create it. Want to give your photos a little extra motion and have fun too? Then this article is for you.

Multiple exposures are a traditional effect that first started in analog photography, where multiple scenes were exposed onto a single film frame to create a single final image. The majority of today’s digital cameras let you achieve this effect inside the camera. But you can get the most control over your results by simulating this technique in Zoner Photo Studio. We’ll be using a wintertime portrait to illustrate the steps.

Celebrate the colorful 1960s with a bold photo transformation. This time around we’ve prepared an article on how to give your photos a little extra pop with a pop-art effect. Just dig around in your archive and find a suitable photo, and in a few minutes you can have your own original graphical retro piece ready for printing. Even if you’re no Andy Warhol. Let’s look at how to do it.

A transparent background is the perfect helper when you’re preparing product photos, collages, or other creative edits. And meanwhile it’s easy to set up. All you need is some basic work with selections, layers, and masks. And then in a couple of minutes you’ve prepared a picture that you can use for jobs like creating posters and invitations.

Sometimes you need to place one photo inside another and make the result look as realistic as possible. And there’s a very simple way to do that. You can use it for example when you’re making invitations... or when you just want to play around a little. So take a look at how to put one photo inside another and create your own photo montage or photo collage.

“This photo could really use a circular crop. And this one here an elliptical or maybe triangular one.” You may have found yourself saying something like this before. But there isn’t a way to crop photos like that on a computer... or maybe there is? Actually, you can produce a circular or elliptical crop in just a few clicks.

A truly compelling picture won’t have any distractions that might steal attention from its subject. But sometimes you just can’t avoid having distractions in the shot. Fortunately you can get rid of them easily with retouching. And you’ve got several ways to do it.