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).