Colin Smith: Collaging in Photoshop
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Are you ready to take it even further? Let's go...

If you have done the other tutorials on PhotoshopCafe you will be very familiar with my colorizing technique.

Go to hue/saturation and colorize the hands with a warm color and very little color saturation, 30% at most. Pull back the opacity on all the layers to 70 - 80%.

Click on the layer 4 thumbnail to select it, then directly to the left of the other thumbnails, click the box. The chain icon will appear. This means the layers are linked. Link the three layers together, but do not link the color background layer. Go to layers > merge linked. (CS2 Users: Hold Down Cmd/Ctl and click each layer to select it and then choose merge layers from the palette options menu.)

You now have only two layers. The composite layer with our art and the white background layer. Let's do something cool and fun.

Select the white layer (layer 3). With the retangular marquee tool "M" draw a smaller rectange inside the picture frame and fill with black. Your results should look something like this.

Select the top layer and make another rectangle larger than the last one. Invert the selection by pressing Ctrl+Shift+I or Mac Cmd+Shift+I. Choose select > feather input with about 10 pixels feather.

Press delete three times and this is what we have.

 

To finish off I have added some type in Screen mode.

I sure hope you enjoyed this tutorial and have learned something about collages. Post some of your finished projects on the PhotoshopCafe.com forum.

For more cool techniques like this in an easy-to-follow video format check out Photoshop Videos.

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