Photoshop Tutorials: Fill A Photo With Photos
Learn Adobe Photoshop with Photoshop Tutorials at Photoshop Essentials.com
Written By Steve Patterson
In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, we're going to create a bit of an optical illusion, filling one photo with many smaller photos, or at least, many copies of a couple of smaller photos. The number of smaller photos you use for this effect is completely up to you. If you view the photo from a distance, you'll see the larger main photo, and if you view it up close, you'll see all the smaller photos inside of it.
I originally saw this effect used in a job recruitment poster for a well-known restaurant chain, but it also works great with family photos, wedding photos, or just as a fun thing to do with photos of all your friends.
Let's say we have a photo of a mother:
And mom has a couple of kids. Here's the photos of the kids:
We're going to create our effect by taking the photos of the two kids and using them to fill the photo of their mom. Here's the effect we're going for:
Let's get started.
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Step 1: Crop The Main Photo Into A Close-Up Of The Person's Face
I'm going to work on the main photo (the photo of mom) first, and what we need to do is crop it into a close-up of her face. Cropping the main image into a square works best for this effect, so grab your Rectangular Marquee Tool from the Tools palette, or press M to quickly access it with the keyboard shortcut:
Then, with the Rectangular Marquee Tool selected, drag out a square selection around the person's face. Hold down your Shift key as you drag to constrain the selection to a perfect square. If you need to reposition your selection as you're dragging it, hold down your spacebar and as you move your mouse, your selection will move along with it. Release the spacebar to continue dragging out the selection:
Now that we have our selection, we can use it to crop the image. Go up to the Image menu at the top of the screen and choose Crop. Photoshop will go ahead and crop the image around the selection, leaving you with just the square area you selected:
That's all we need to do with the main photo for now. Let's work on the photos of the kids.
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