Tenacious Creations

 Recently I made a similar graphic to the one above for a friend to use on her website. She was very grateful and sent me an e-mail full of praise for spending my time to do that for her. I had to tell her that it is really simple and I cannot take all the credit because I did use a photo shop action. So I figured I would write a tutorial to show just how easy it is to create this nice effect.

1. First thing you need to do is to go to addictedtodesign.com and download the free Polaroid 600 action. If you have never installed an action in photo shop before I recommend you read addictedtodesign.com’s guide.
2. Now that you have the action installed select the Polaroid 600 action and press the
   Play button



3. All you have to do now as follow the steps as the action runs. It will ask you to select the photo you want to use. Then it will ask you to adjust the handles to crop the photo so it is the right size for the Polaroid.


all the photos used here are from http://www.sxc.hu/




4. Run this action on all the photos you want to use in the spread of Polaroids. Make sure you do not close the images as you make them.
5. After you have the images you want to use converted to Polaroid like pictures, create a new image by going File > New Image. I made mine 6000 px wide by 2500 px tall with a transparent background. How big you make it is dependent on how big your Polaroid images are. Mine worked out to be about 1051 px wide each. Do not worry if yours are not all the same size as you be able to resize them when you drag them to your new image.


 

6. Now select the Move tool . Move one of your Polaroid images onto your new image. Adjust it so it looks like it was randomly thrown there. Once you have it positioned hit the enter key.
7. After you have pressed the enter key double click on the layer (click on the icon of the image) to bring up the layer properties. Then select drop shadow and check the box next to it. Now play with the settings until the shadow looks right.


 
 

 
 


8. Repeat steps 6 and 7 until you have placed all the images you want to use. Remember to adjust them so they look like they were randomly dropped.




9. After all you images are placed use the crop tool to cut out any extra blank space from your image and you are done. Now if this is going on a web site you can fill the first layer with whatever color the background of the site is to ensure it looks good. But I would recommend saving it with a transparent background. That way it the site changes background color it will still look like it belongs. Below is the finished project

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