Adobe Photoshop Tutorial: Using A Photo As Its Own Background
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Written By Steve Patterson
In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, we're going to learn how to use a photo as its own background, which is a great effect to use with wedding photography but can also be used with any image. We're going to be creating two copies of our photo, using one as our main image and the other as the background, which we'll be colorizing, flipping and fading into more of a watermark-style image.
We'll then take our main photo, reduce it in size, give it a nice border and shadow effect, and finally, move it into the perfect spot in front of the background. We'll even be sampling some colors from the image to make sure everything blends in nicely. This is an easy photo effect to create and takes very little time from start to finish.
Here's the image I'll be starting with:
And here's the final effect we're going for:
Let's get started.
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Step 1: Duplicate The Background Layer Twice
The first thing we need to do for this photo effect is create a couple of copies of our image. We can see in the Layers palette that we currently have just one layer, the Background layer, which contains our photo:
Let's make a couple of copies of it, and for that, we'll use the handy keyboard shortcut Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac). Use the keyboard shortcut once to create the first copy, then use it again to create a second copy. You should now have three layers in your Layers palette:
The main reason why we've created two copies here is to avoid working on our original Background layer, since it contains our photo's original pixel information and we always want to keep that safe in case we need to go back to it.
Step 2: Hide The Top Layer
The layer at the top of the Layers palette is going to become our main page, but we're going to work on the layer below it for now, which is going to become our background. In order to see what we're doing though, we need to hide the top layer. To do that, click on its layer visibility icon (the icon that looks like an eyeball) on the left of the layer in the Layers palette:
Nothing will appear to have happened to your image when you hide the top layer, since all three layers contain the exact same image, but we'll now be able to see what we're doing when we turn the layer below it into our background, which we'll do next.
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