How To Make A Collage In Photoshop

We're going to have a look at how to create a collage using Photoshop. So, what we're going to do is create a collage using Photoshop. Now, I suggest that for this, unless you're a real whiz at using Photoshop and my guess is you're probably not or you wouldn't be actually looking this up on the internet now, that you're best using Photoshop Elements.

It's a lot cheaper than Photoshop to buy, a lot cheaper and it's a stripped-down version of the main Photoshop, but has got everything that you need, it's very powerful, and from the point of view of an artist, that's all we need. We go to File, and then New, and then Blank File and then I'm going to take a fairly wide screen like that and open up our basic canvas. What we're going to do next is choose certain images that we're going to combine together that we'll open in different layers.

So, here I take Open File, Open, and then on the Desktop, I actually already have on my Desktop some images which are in a folder I have prepared called Collage, there it is. So I open the folder and these are, well, they are some images from my own paintings, in fact, that we are going to actually use as part of the Photoshop. So I'm going to take that image there and open it up and you see there it's down as the background and we have it on the Photo-bin at the bottom.

So I'm going to just open up two more images and if we take maybe this painting here, and you notice that now, that has gone on top of the previous layer. Finally, if we open up a third image, shall we say that image there and that is a final image. In fact, that is a painting that is incorporating collage already.

Okay, what we might then do is decide to Cut and Paste some of the images from here. First of all, we need to select the Lasso tool which is just there and maybe we want to cut out that area there of the image. We go Cut, and if we're going to have this maybe as our main backdrop, we will then put, Paste there.

There we have that image there, quite small on the background. Then we could take this image here and again with our Lasso tool, we could cut part of this out. We've identified the area with Lasso and then we take Cut, and then Paste that there.

So then, I select the Move tool and move that to where I want on the canvas and then maybe I decide that I want to use a little bit more here so I reselect the Lasso tool and I can Cut out another area here and I may decide that I want to actually Paste it there. Again, I take the Move tool and I move that up to there. So what I'm doing is cutting out different areas from the original paintings that I have photographed digitally and moving them around just as I would with cut up bits of magazine or photograph or painting in a more traditional collage.

And the last piece, I might move that there and so forth. So there we have the - I'll get rid of these pieces here - our final collage which I will then Save As, shall we say, Collage One, in my folder on the Desktop. .