Question: How do I get a crinkly photo look at my collage?

Vered's "watercolor" set is the one. We can get that crinkly photo look. I also use Vered's "blotch" and "filtered" sets a lot! By Tere.

Another great way to use Vered's watercolor brushes is to use them in a mask.. again you can vary the opacity<of the mask *and* the brush you are using>.. thus leaving you with lots of options in how strong, light, dark it is.. you can even mask the mask and take out some of the brush it is too strong in places. By Touchstone.

Question: How did Tere make the collage of her main page?

I didn't use any brushes to get the borderless effect on my splash picture. I started putting the two main images on a blue-greenish background and blended them using screen mode, then duplicated them using soft light mode. This usually helps a lot when you want to "clean" a picture and partially answers your second request. Then I did the copy merged trick that Vered explained some messages below and started working on the merged image. I selected the airbrush leaving the opacity very low (10/20%) and started "erasing" the borders. Before doing it, make sure that your background colour is set to white. At that point I picked a picture that contained some roses (a stock image found at Gettyone) and started adding the roses to my collage. Some roses are more visible, some less, but that's exactly what I was looking for. Then I added the two small pictures (the hand holding from FTF and the PM kiss) blending them with soft light mode ... or maybe it was overlay, I don't remember exactly, sorry. That's all ... some brushes by Vered (the watercolor set) did the rest. She made all her sets available for PS 6 *and* PS 5.5 users, so if you'd like you can use them too. By Tere.

Question: how do you blend vered's watercolor brush when you use it? Mine either disppears or ends up looking like sad lightning!!

I create a new layer, choose the "normal" blending mode and then I use the brush making sure that my background colour is set to white. You can select another colour, of course, but I personally like white with this set of brushes. If it looks too "strong", you can always reduce the layer opacity, choose "soft light" instead of "normal" or even erase parts of the brush that may be covering some parts of the collage that you don't want to be hidden. By Tere.

Question: What do you mean by screen. Do you mean like mask? Or do you change image/layer options and put the layer in screen and then merge linked?

With "screen" I simply mean the layer option ... I've never used masks, actually, just play with the blending options. Sometimes when you use "screen" your image looks too light, but then when you duplicate the layer and put "soft light" or "overlay" instead of screen, you'll notice the difference. By Tere.