I want to include pictures of each of my kids and their families in my Christmas letter but I don't have a group picture of each family. How can I put them all together in a way that won't look like a big mish-mash?

I use photoshop, which is expensive (but can be downloaded off the internet, though officially i say that that is illegal and i would never condone it). :) In photoshop you can cut things out, and paste them into the same photo. I'm sure there are probably other ways of going about it, but I would find some techie friend or child, and make them do it for you.

I use photoshop, but I'm afraid that the pictures will look like floating heads if I just cut them out and put them together.

If there was a way to get the photos to some place accessible, i'd offer to do it for, as it'd probably only take about 15 minutes.

are you a friend of Ben's, by chance?

Evan, you are a dear! But if I can just figure out how to put a bunch of heads together so that they don't look stupid, I probably can do it. Yes, I am a friend of Ben's. I am Andrew's mother. But a lot of good that does me! He's too busy to answer my questions. That's why I love Fluther!

hehe.. that's pretty funny. there's a tool in photoshop (depending on the version) that'll let you cut out shapes, heads, people, etc. pretty easily.. i'll get back to you with what it's called

Thanks, Evan!

The tool I was thinking of is under "filters" and it's toward the top and it's called "extract" - but it's sort of fussy to get it to work. the other thing to try would be the magnetic lasso, which you can get to if you hold down the icon for the lasso tool (under the rectangular box, the marquee tool) and then select the magnetic lasso - it'll help you select right on the edge of the heads that you want to cut out, but even that can be tricky.

Thanks for all of the info, Evan. I think I will put each family in a large oval with a background and then put the pix in cutouts within the ovals.

Have fun with floating heads...use them as ornaments on a tree!

Now that's a good idea!