Easy Photo Collage Tutorial for Photoshop

This easy photo collage tutorial uses a Polaroid frame template and a photograph… that’s it for the required resources! The method I use here is very simple if a little time-consuming, but that all depends on how many Polaroids you wish to use.

Photo Collage Tutorial Resources:

Photo: George on Pixabay

Polaroid Frame:

Step 1

Open the photo or stock image you wish to use, for this first example, I am using a stock image from George on Pixabay.

Step 2

Open the Polaroid Frame and drag it into your photo document. Rename the layer ‘frame‘.

Now it is your choice if you wish to keep it at the original size or reduce the size to use more frames.

I reduced the frame to 450px x 541px, using the Transform tool: Ctrl > T.

Now place the frame where you want it on the photo, and using Ctrl > T, rotate it a little.

Step 3

Duplicate the frame layer and again, using CTRL + T, rotate it and place it elsewhere on the photo.

Repeat this step until you have covered the photo and/or you have enough frames for your requirements.

Step 4

Select the first ‘frame‘ layer, and set the foreground colour to anything – I used grey. Using the Magic Wand tool, click in the frame aperture to select the image area.

• Select > Modify > Expand – 10 pixels > OK

Create a new layer UNDER the ‘frame‘ layer and fill the selection with grey.

Now put these 2 layers into a group.

Repeat this step for all frames.

Tip: when you select each ‘frame‘ layer, if you turn off the visibility, you will see which frame is selected. Restore visibility to create the selection.

Your layers palette should look like this now:

Step 5

Now we will place the photo into each frame.

• Duplicate the original photo layer (at the bottom of the layers palette), then drag the copy between the 2 layers in the first group.
• Hold down the Alt key on your keyboard, and hover it between the 2 layers until you see a downwards pointing arrow.
• Click the mouse button to clip the photo to the placeholder.

You need to turn off the visibility of the background layer to see the effect.

Repeat this step for each group.

Step 6

You may not be happy with the order of your layers, so you can change this simply by dragging and dropping the groups to the desired place. The images below show the ones I want to change, followed by the order I want.

Step 7

You may find, that no matter how much you change the order, you have frame borders where you don’t want them!

To move the frame on the photo, you will have to:

• Unclip the photo from the placeholder
• Select the frame and placeholder layers – do this by clicking on the frame layer, hold down the CTRL key and click on the placeholder layer. This will select just the 2 layers and not the photo layer in the middle.

Now you can move or rotate the frame as you wish, then simply clip the photo to the placeholder when you are done.

Step 8

Select all the groups by clicking on the top one, holding down the Shift key on your keyboard and clicking on the bottom one.

• CTRL+G to group them.

To centre the image, CTRL+A to select the canvas, use the Move Tool and click on the horizontal and vertical centre icons along the top bar.

Step 9

Add a background. I am not including a background in this tutorial as it is not a ‘one size fits all’ situation. I used a gradient from my Autumn Gradients set – Autumn #9 with the following settings applied:

And here is the finished collage.

Here is another example. The image is from Jurgen on Pixabay and the gradient background is from my Winter Gradients set.