Visitor request: Creating photo collages in photoshop

One of our respected visitors has requested a tutorial on making a picture collage. He wanted to make a collage of his friends faces so we will be focusing on this part. Anyway, collages are a very simple task in a beginner's level so i've decided to show you how to make a few different variations of a them. There's lots of things you can do to the pictures to achieve a stunning collage and this tutorial only shows a few simplest of them. In any case the techniques in this tutorial are very easy so advanced users might not find anything they don't yet know. Advanced users may be interested in advanced collage techniques, such as the one described in this tutorial.

Preparation

First of all, as mentioned above, we will be making a collage from people's faces. So let's find ourselves some real or imaginary friends photos :) I've picked some random photos from sxc.hu so you can do the same or use your friends pictures. Here are the links to the pictures i've used:

Picture # 1 | Picture # 2 | Picture # 3 | Picture # 4 | Picture # 5 | Picture # 6

Collage 1 - the very basic collage

For a basic collage, we will simply put the photos together in a single picture. This is a very basic task for the very beginners so if some of you can't think of a way to do this in less than a second - you're probably a beginner :) No worries, i'll teach you how and then we'll move on with a little more complex solutions. So in my case i have 6 pictures that i want to use. I think i'll create 2 rows with 3 pictures in each. To make things easier, we can choose the same size for every picture, then the only thing left to do will be placing them side by side. I'm thinking of using equal width and height pictures so i should decide what size each of them will be. Since i'm not making it for a real world application, i'll use very small images of 200x200 pixels. When you do your collage, you'll probably need bigger pictures: just make sure your actual pictures are bigger than the size you will be cropping them to. You don't need to use square images like i do - it's totally up to you. So in my case i have 6 pictures and i want to crop each one of them to 200x200 pixels squares. I also want to put them in two rows 3 photos each. That means the width of the collage will be 3 pictures * 200 pixels = 600 pixels. And the height ... you guessed: 200 pixels * 2 pictures = 400 pixels. So create a new 600x400 px document and let's begin. The trick here is to take every picture, crop the desired area (in this case, we will be using people's faces) and move the picture onto our collage document. Let's do it with our first picture. I'll be using this one:

This picture is originally 2848x4288 px in dimensions and i will need to convert it to 200x200 px square. That can be done very easily. Open the first photo in photoshop and select the crop tool

from the tools palette. On the top of the window there's a settings panel for the current tool:

You need to fill the width and height values with the ones you want to use for each picture. I've already assigned them both to 200. Now when you draw a crop rectangle, it will automatically adjust to the required aspect ratio and when you apply the crop, the image will be automatically resized to the values you've defined. If you've also decided to use square crops - you'll notice that the crop tool won't even allow you to draw a rectangle shape and you will always draw a square. So let's cut out the face. Draw a square (or is it a rectangle in your case?) on the image:

Now press ENTER to crop. Press CTRL+A to select everything and CTRL+C to copy. You can now close this picture and make sure you don't accidentally save it while closing :) We have the cropped picture in the clipboard so we can come back to our original document and paste it there (CTRL+V):

Every picture you paste should be pasted on a new layer so rename the layer so that you could recognize it later. I've named this one r1c1 which means row1 column1 (the top left picture):

That way you won't get lost between the layers. You should name them the way you want but you most definately should name them :) Trust me if there's many picture - you will get lost! Next thing to do is grab the move tool

from the tools palette and move the picture to its place:

Remember how we cropped the original picture to be able to insert it into our collage? If you don't - read the above section again and do the same with all of your pictures one by one. Crop the pictures, copy - paste them to a new layer in your collage document and move them into their positions. And there you have it - the very basic picture collage:

Now that we know how to simply put the pictures together side by side, we can move on to more difficult and creative types of collages. Continue reading to find out just a couple of methods of achieving more creative results.

Collage 2 - images in the holes of a background

In this part we will be creating a collage that i don't even know how to describe :) It's basically a background and images behind it, showing through some holes. To do this, we'll need a background image. I've used this one from deviantart. So open this image in photoshop. If a little lock is displayed on the background layer - double-click it and press OK to unlock. Now take the rectangular marquee tool

from the tools palette, make a selection and press delete. Something like that:

The trick here is to make lots of selections like this, connecting with the whole deleted area. So make some more selections and delete them until you have some random looking hole in the picture like this:

Get the idea? The hole should look like a puzzle or something like that. I don't know how else to explain it, the picture above should say it all. Now when you have this hole, paste a picture on top of the current layer. To do that, simply open one of the photos, press CTRL+A, CTRL+C and in the collage document - CTRL+V. You'll now have a picture on a new layer. Also the picture can be too big to see so we will need to resize it. At first, set the opacity of your picture layer to about 90% so that we could see the background through it. Press CTRL+T, zoom out as much as you need to see the entire outline of the transformation rectangle and, while holding the SHIFT key, move the bottom right transformation handle up until the picture of your friend fits into the background picture. Since you have the opacity lowered down, you can now resize/position the picture so that the face would end up on top of the hole like this:

When you're done - press ENTER to apply transformation. Change the opacity of the photo layer back to 100% and move it below the background layer. The only thing you'll now see is what's in the area of the hole:

Now take the magic wand tool

from the tools palette and click once on the hole with the background layer selected. This should select the entire hole. Select the picture layer, press CTRL+SHIFT+I to invert selection and DEL to delete. This will delete the rest of the photo, leaving only the part behind the hole. You can now create another hole the same way you created the first one and add another picture to it, again, using the same method as before:

Add as many pictures as you need:

Now select the background layer and grab the magic wand tool

from the tools palette. Click once on any of the holes to select it. Hold the SHIFT key and click on other holes to add them to the selection as well:

Create a new layer on top of everything, press D for default color values and then ALT+BACKSPACE to fill the selection with black. You should now have the holes filled in black instead of showing the photos through:

We will now apply some effects to this layer to add some depth to our composition. First, drag the value of the fill slider all the way down to 0%. Now double-click the topmost layer and add the following styles:

This will add some effects to the black filled holes, but since we set the fill to 0% - the black areas themselves will be invisible and only the effects will be shown. The end result should be something like that:

And there you have it - the second collage. Obviously you'll add more effort and images to make it look better. The best result will probably be achieved if you have very many pictures very close to each other. In that case the background doesn't make very much of a sence, but it's still required.

Part 3 - a star wars collage :)

This is a perspectively transformed collage that looks like tose intro texts in star wars movies. To create it, use the instructions in the part 1 to end up with a very simple collage. NOTE: if you want this collage to look good - you need as many pictures as possible. I was too lazy to use many pictures so i've created a collage from the same 6 pictures repeated a few times. When you're done with the basic collage, press CTRL+A and CTRL+SHIFT+C to select all and copy the contents of all the layers. That way we will have the entire collage in the clipboard. Press CTRL+N to create a new document. The size of the document should be automatically filled to match the picture in the clipboard and that's not good. We need the size to be 2 or more times less the document we have in the clipboard. So use a calculator and divide each width and height values by 2 (or a bigger number). Press OK to create the document. Now press D to set the default colors and ALT+BACKSPACE to fill the entire picture with black. Zoom out to see the entire picture and paste the collage by pressing CTRL+V. This should paste on a separate layer. To not get mixed up, rename the top layer to pictures and the bottom to background. Press CTRL+T on the pictures layer to transform it and then center it in the document:

Now hold the ALT key and drag the corner handles to form a shape like this:

Apply by pressing ENTER. Now we need to fade the image. To do that, create a layer mask by pressing the layer mask button

in the layers panel (the pictures layer should be selected before you do this). Now grab the gradient tool

from the tools palette and press D to default the color values. On the top of the window there's a tool settings panel. Use the following settings for your gradient:

Now add the first fade by clicking on the top of the images and dragging down a little:

The result should be as follows:

And let's do the same with the bottom fade. Draw a gradient from top to bottom like this one:

And there you have it - the star wars intro effect on your collage:

Here's an example with even more pictures and a space background: