Panoramic Photo Word Collage

Vector drawn letters have been combined into a word to frame this scenic beach photo. One panoramic photo was used to create this collage.

Duplicate the photo you wish to frame and create new image. Promote background to a layer. Add a vector layer named 'frame'.

Open the PSP file containing your bubble letters. One by one, select each letter you need to create the word for your scenic collage, copy it and paste it into the 'frame' layer as a 'new vector selection'.

Resize letters to fit the photo by dragging one of the corner handles with the Pick tool. Align each letter to spell your word. I like to overlap the letters slightly so the final image will have a continuous unbroken scene, but that is not necessary.

With Pick tool, right click, Select All. Open the Properties dialog to change the fill color to none. Also change color and size of the outline stroke, if you wish. For the above image, I changed color to match blue in photo and widened the stroke.

Now that you can see your scene thru the letters, you can reposition the word to frame the best parts of the photo.

Next we want to create a raster selection in order to cut away the parts of the photo we won't be using. There's a few ways to do this. You can temporarily fill each letter with color and use the context menu to 'Create Raster Selection'. (If there is no fill color, only the outline will be selected.) Another way is to use the Magic Wand. That seems the simplest for this step.

Hold the Shift key down and use the Magic Wand to select the interior of each vector letter. Make sure you get all the pieces, including the overlapped areas. To give ourselves a little room for error, let's make this selection a little larger by at least 3 pixels. Selections>Modify>Expand 3

Next...invert the selection Selections>Invert
Make your photo the active layer and 'Cut' to remove portions of photo outside the letters.
Convert vector layer to raster. Zoom in and use Eraser tool to carefully erase unwanted overlapping lines, if any.

Now you can Select None and Merge Visible unless you want to apply some filters and embellishments before merging layers. In the above image I converted the vector layer to raster, erased some parts of the overlapping letters, added a cutout and added a drop shadow. For a little added embellishment I also copied the palm trees from the original photo, enlarged them, and pasted trees on a new layer between the letters and the photo, letting parts of the tree extend beyond the frame.

What other things can you think of making with these bubble letters?