Creating a Photo Grid

Creating a Grid

Create a document in photoshop that is 10 inches by 10 inches at 250 ppi resolution.

Open your rulers Cmd>R

Right click on the ruler (top or side) and change the units to percentage.

Drag down a guide from the top ruler and place at 10 (percent). Drag down a guide at 20 and so on until you have created guides from the top to the bottom every 10 percent.

Now drag over a guide from the left and place at 10. Drag over a guide at 20 and so on until you have created guides from left to right every 10 percent.

These blue lines are just guidelines. You can toggle them off by clicking Cmd>:

Now we are going to build the grid using the guidelines.

Select the Shape tool from the tools bar on the left, hold down and select the line tool.

Make sure the line attributes along the top show: Shape, Fill: white, stroke: white, 12 pt.

While holding down the shift key (This will keep you line either perfectly horizontal or vertical), slide your line from outside the grid on the left to just outside the grid on the right. Do this for every horizontal blue guide line.

Do the same thing for every vertical blue guideline. Click Cmd>: to see your grid without the blue lines. Make sure you have drawn a white line over every blue guideline.

Make your grid lines thicker. Double click on the Shape 1 layer and click to the right of the Stroke style that is on the left side. Make the color white, the size 12 (or something a bit larger than 3), and position: center.

When your grid is complete and the lines are the width you want, right click on the Shape 1 layer and Rasterize it. Take off your blue grids - Cmd>:

Adding and Manipulating the Photo

Bring a photo onto a layer below your grid, make sure it is unlocked and rasterized (right click and choose rasterize). From now on you are going to be moving back and forth between these two layers. Selecting the shape layer and then selecting the image layer and back and forth.

Select the Shape layer and using your Magic Wand tool, select a square near the outside of the grid, move to the image layer (select it) and click delete. You can select multiple squares by keeping the shift key selected. Keep doing this as much or as little as you want to make the outside edge of the image irregular shaped (see image a the top of the page).

Add a white layer using the circle icon at the bottom of the layers palette (like we did with the double exposure tutorial) and make the layer white. Move it to the bottom of all the layers. This will just keep you from having to look at the transparent checkerboard while you work.

Keep going back to the Shape layer to make a selection, and then with the marching ants still on, move to the image layer and make an adjustment to that square of the image. You can do all sorts of things to change up the individual squares such as:

Change to Black & White (Image>adjustment>black and white) Change the color (Image>adjustment>Hue and Saturation) Change the texture (Filter>Filter Gallery) Copy another picture into that spot Be creative, the more you change up the individual squares the more

interesting the image will become.

Creative ExtensionHow else could you use a grid with photography? Check out the student work below and on the next page. Receive extra credit for creating a different kind of grid image than the one you did in this tutorial.

See more examples on the next page…