Photoshop Tutorial: Creating a Simple Collage Effect

One of my favorite things to create in Photoshop is a collage. A collage is basically several photos put together to create one big picture. You can make collages with tons of small pictures overlapping, or more simple ones with just one or two pictures. In this tutorial, I am going to show you how to create a simple collage effect with just a few pictures.

To start with you will need a few pictures. You can place these photos onto a plain background, or you can use another photo as your background. In this example, I am going to use a picture as the background (see picture: 1). So open up your background or picture. Go to File, Open and browse to find the picture that you want. Next, open up another picture which will go on top of the background.

Use the Move tool on the left tool bar and click on the new picture and then drag it over your back ground. This will place the photo on top onto a new layer. Make sure that the new layer is selected by clicking on that layer in the layer palette. If you do not you're your layer palette open, open it by going to Window (up top) and selecting Layer. Now we need to resize and move this new photo to position it exactly where you want it.

Go to Edit and then select Free Transform. Hold down the Shift key and drag the corner of the photo to resize it (holding down the shift key will keep the photo proportioned). Use the move tool to slide the picture around to where you would like it. You can move the curser to the edges of the photo to get an icon that will allow you to rotate the photo if you like (see picture: 2). Once you have it positioned well, double click inside the photo to set it.

Now we are going to add some nice effects to make the photo stand out more. Let's begin by adding a small border. Again, make sure you are working on the new photo's layer and not the background. Go to Layer (up top) and then Layer Styles and select Stroke. You can use whatever color and size you like. For this tutorial I used a medium grey color and made a very thin border(see picture: 3).

Next let's add a little dimension to the picture by placing a shadow under the new picture. Go to Layer and select layer Styles again, then select Drop Shadow. You can play with the settings to see what works best for you. For this tutorial I used a 1 pixel distance and a 6 pixel size to create a nice shadow effect (see picture: 4).

Now we can add some more pictures. To do this, just keep repeating the steps by opening up a new photo, dragging it over your picture and creating another new layer, and then applying the stroke border and the drop shadow to create a nice looking effect. You can get really creative and add as many photos as you like and moving them around to where you like. You can also play with the other layer styles to create interesting effects. For this tutorial I added two pictures to my background to make a very simple and classy collage effect (see picture: 5). You can get very creative and do all kinds of neat things now that you have the basics!