resizing for collage amking & printing

Hi there. For the first time I am want to start selling a my images on keyrings and fridge magnets.

To make best use of my print paper it makes sense to collect a bunch of images put them into another photoshop frame all together and print just the one print.

I've tried this and of course it looks a mess.

I can print to 7x5 or 8x6 or 9x6 not that make a differnce.

If I start by creating a background do I set to 7x5" res 72 or res 300?
Then I need to crop & resize the images

Finally all this needs to come together to print properly

i hope I'm clear, it's not easy putting this into words

Thanks
snappy

Well, I'd say it's up to you how you want to approach your layout. You could create the background document with dimension in pixels or in inches with your desired printing resolution (which should be 300 ppi, by the way, not the 72 ppi that you see cropping up, change that to 300).

So, for a 5x7 print, you can just fill in the pixels, so (5x300)x(7x300), so 1500x2100 pixels, or 5 inches and 7 inches @ 300 ppi. For doing it using the pixels approach the ppi/resolution won't matter.

Then, it would be very helpful as you are preparing to place an image into the document to resize the image appropriately before dropping it into its own layer in the document. You can do this using the same approach you took in creating the document but either approach would work, just get it the proper size so that you can "place" it in the frame of the document properly.