Photoshop Tutorials: Turn A Photo Into A Collage Of Squares
Learn Adobe Photoshop with Photoshop Tutorials at Photoshop Essentials.com
Written By Steve Patterson
In this Photoshop photo effects tutorial, we're going to learn how to turn a photo into a collage of squares.
It's a fun effect, and it's really easy to do, especially since most of the work is simple repetition, as we shall see.
Here's the original photo I'll be starting with:
And here's the image with the completed "Collage of Squares" effect:
As I said, most of the work is just repetition, so once you get "into the groove" with what you're doing, you won't even need to think about it. You can just have fun creating the effect.
Let's get started.
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Step 1: Duplicate The Background Layer
With my image open in Photoshop, I currently have just one layer, the Background layer, which contains my original image:
I need to duplicate the Background layer, so I'm going to use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac), which adds a copy of the Background layer in the Layers palette. Photoshop automatically names the copy "Layer 1":
Step 2: Add A New Layer Between The Two Layers And Fill It With White
We need to add a new blank layer between the two layers we currently have in the Layers palette. To do that, with "Layer 1" selected, hold down the Ctrl (Win) / Command (Mac) key on your keyboard and click on the New Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette. Normally Photoshop adds the new layer above the currently selected layer, but by holding down Ctrl/Command, this tells Photoshop to add the new layer below it instead:
I now have my new blank layer, "Layer 2", between the two other layers:
Just a quick note before we continue.... We're going to end up with lots of layers by the time this effect is finished, and normally that would mean we'd definitely want to make sure we're naming our layers as we go. In this case though, you'd probably drive yourself mad trying to come up with descriptive names for each layer, so unless that sort of thing appeals to you, I wouldn't worry about naming your layers when creating this effect. Generally speaking though, naming layers is a habit you should get into.
Having said that, let's continue. We need to fill this new layer with white, since we're going to use white as our background color for the effect, so press the letter D on your keyboard to reset your Foreground and Background colors, which makes white your Background color, and then with the new blank layer selected in the Layers palette, use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Backspace (Win) / Command+Delete (Mac) to fill the layer with white.
You won't see anything happen in your Document Window, since the copy of the Background layer is blocking "Layer 2" from view, but if you look in the Layers palette, you'll see that the thumbnail preview for the layer is now filled with white:
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