How to Create a Collage Template and Use Clipping Masks in Photoshop

hi there this is Morgan with Morgan Burke's photography and products shop and today I'm going to show you really quick how to make your own template and how to use clipping masks to include pictures on them so this is what I'm starting with it's just a new document all I did was come in here I went to file new and then I went to US paper and hit OK and then it was oops that's not what I did hang on a second went to file new and then I changed this to US paper and then I hit OK and when this popped up I went to image and then I went to image rotation and then just turned it 90 degrees clockwise you could change those dimensions when you go to file new change them to whatever size document you want if you want a 5 by 7 or an 8 by 10 whatever you would like and so to get the little black boxes and the spaces all I did was just grab my rectangle tool right here and the fill was set to white so I just changed that to black and my stroke is nothing so I don't want to line around it and so all I did there oops cancel that is just stretch and drag to make the rectangles and then these rectangles excuse me are basically just where you want your photos to go when you put them on your template so you can make them any size obviously if they aren't the exact dimensions of your photo it'll crop a little bit out but that's up to you so anyway that's all I did I'm going to close this one out since I already did it here yeah I basically just dragged those in and made the shapes that I wanted for these bottom ones down here to make sure they were exact same size all I did was I made the first one which was this one here I turn it off so you can see which one it is there you go all I did to make sure that it was exactly the same size as the next box was just to duplicate it so I just dragged my layer down here doubled it up um make sure you have your move tool and then you could just move it right over just like that there you go and so that's pretty much all I did for that I'm going to light that one and then pop that one back up okay so to get photos in here what you'll want to do is have your photos open now here I'm just I'm using ones that have my logo on it just because these are web size photos and it'll be easy to drop in there but you obviously might not want to do that so you definitely don't have to yeah this is just for display purposes so what I'm going to do is I'm going to open the photos that I want to use and these are the ones I'm going to use today these for photos all from the same session I'm going to grab my move tool click directly on the photo and I'm going to hold my mouse down and drop it over the template and I'm not going to let go of my mouse until I'm directly over the template you want to be sure you're right over the template then you can let go okay so for this what I want to do is in my layers panel over here when you drop this image in you want to place this layer sorry that was my phone you want to place this layer directly above the little box that you want the photo to be in so if I want this photo to be in this bottom left-hand box right here I'm going to drag it above that box now I've already renamed these two bottom left and top and all of that stuff but you will drag this just like this let's say I wanted it in the left box I could do that and it would just come over here and and be on top of that one to get it to apply I'm sorry hang on I'm getting ahead of myself I want this photo to be in this bottom left-hand box so I'm going to drag it right above the bottom left-hand box and then just kind of drag it over on top of there now what I'm going to do to get it to apply to that box is I'm going to right click on this layer and I'm going to hit create clipping mask and it'll just pop that right in there now a lot of the photo is cut out so if you want to resize all you have to do is making sure that photo layer is selected you're going to go to edit free transform and then you can stretch and drag these edges now I know a lot of people know the trick to hold down the shift-key so that your photo doesn't stretch or distort but another thing that you can do is just hit this little link button right up here and what that does is it locks those corners for you and keeps your photo the exact same dimensions so you don't have to hold the shift key or worrying about making a mistake so drag it to the dimensions you want if you go too far you'll notice you'll see the black box again so just make sure that those edges there are covered and hit your check mark when you're done and you can use your move tool to move this around within that little space however you'd like it so once you do that you can move on to the next image and all I'm going to do is come over here and click on the next one again grab my move tool click directly on that photo and hover over our template layer and don't let go until you are on top of the template and then you can let it go now as you can see the black box is in front of this photo and I don't want that I want the photo to be on top so I'm going to drag it right above and it's going to be right above this little bottom right square or rectangle because I want it down here hope this is my consent sorry from getting ahead of myself okay so what I'm going to do is again right-click on this layer and hit create clipping mask and that will put it right there in that box and again you're going to use your move tool bring it over go to edit free transform hold down that little link and drag those corners to however you want it and then fit that in there and I want to get this a little bit more so her little feet aren't cut off all the way there we go and bring it up a little higher so it's even with the other perfect okay so yes you can see the logos are different on these photos so having them on a template with Lobos isn't very good and now that I'm doing it I can see that I left a little bit of black space here on the other one so I'm going to go to that one just click right on the photo layer and you can either use your move tool to do this or you can hit your arrow keys on your keyboard just to nudge it over a little bit and so there is that now I'll do the last two photos really quick for you just click them again with the move tool and don't let go until your mouse is actually over the template and you see your little mouse change there we go so I'm going to line this up here perfect and I have to find in the layers panel which one I want and I want it to be in this left box over here so I'm going to drag that photo all the way down there to the left box and then I'm going to right click and hit create clipping mask and it pops it right in there and again we're going to go to edit free transform be sure to hit that link and then stretch those edges to get it to fit now this one's a little bit narrow so if you notice one of your subject is out and you can't make it fit without showing some of that black space just hit the checkmark and I'll show you what you can do instead of adjusting the photo you can adjust the little template space so you can go to edit free transform and this time I'm not going to hit the link because I do want to change the dimensions I want to make this wider and so I can pull this over and since it's already clipped it'll start to reveal a little bit of that photo there so now you want to make sure that now it's the edges closer to the side of the frame as there's a bigger space over here so you might want to move that later but I'll show you how I do that so once you're finished dragging and you think that looks pretty good you can hit your check mark and then click the photo again and just make sure I'm using my arrow keys to nudge you're just going to fit them in there how you want it and just like that actually edit free transform there's a little bit of black space on top so I'm just going to stretch it a little bit higher but I'm going to make sure to hit my link and then just stretch it up there we go and hit the check mark so now that one's nice and filled and we can do the last one and then I'll show you how to move everything over so it's nice and spaced on here and so we're gonna hit the last one click directly on the photo drag it over on top of our template one last time and don't let go until it's on your template then we are going to drag it above the rectangle that we want to put it in the rectangle is the one that says top again I labeled these myself so you will have to find which rectangles that you created that you want to put your photos on I'm going to use my move tool just to put this up here and then I'm going to right click and hit create clipping mask and again I'm going to go to edit free transform hit the link and stretch this over until it fills and that's good to go so we hit the check mark now what I'm going to do to make sure that this is perfectly spaced and what I mean by that is there's a little space here between this photo and the edge and there's a lot of space here between this edge and I want to make that even so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go down to my layers panel and hit the layer that's right above the background layer then I'm going to scroll all the way to top and hit the shift key on my keyboard and click that top layer so it selects everything and then what I'm going to do is make sure my move tool is still selected I'm going to use the arrow keys on my keyboard just to nudge these photos over until I like the way it looks and you can nudge it up a little bit too because I didn't have it perfect in there um yeah so it's at your discretion and obviously this would look a lot better if my little Lobos weren't on there but for times sake I just used the files I had already saved for my client for a web so there is your template excuse me you can save this for web and you could post this for your client you could make these shapes any size you'd like you could make circles you just right click and hit the round open up it's rounded rectangle tool the ellipse tool and that's how you make a circle and you could clip a photo right into a circle to make sure that the circle is a perfect circle gosh how many times I'm going am I going to say circle you can hit the shift key and it will make sure that it stays perfectly round that way you don't end up with an oval and then you'll just clip your photo to that I'm not going to do that here we used rectangles this time but that is an option you could pretty much make any shape you'd wanted come in here you can find some custom shapes and you could paste that shape in there and you could even clip a photo directly into there now this is obviously going to look terrible for a second but I'll just show you that you can and it will clip right there in that shape so again you want to make sure that your photo is above the shape you want to apply it to right click hit create clipping mask and then edit free transform hold your link and stretch it you want to make sure all those little corners are covered until it fits right in there oops oh my link unchecked okay that's why it stretch so what we're going to do is go to edit free transform again and just make sure that you check that link I guess it didn't get checked all the way so there we go just stretch it over and stretch it over perfect and then hit the check mark when you're finished and there you go it's in there now obviously I don't want this on top of my template but I just wanted to show you that you could make a photo fit into any of these shapes over here so I hope you have a great time making your own little templates and you could use this for Timeline covers on Facebook or anything like that you can even pop like a texture or like stripes if you have like a stripe background or something like that just be sure to drag it into your layers panel right above the background layer that way it's under all of these photos and clipping masks so I hope that wasn't too much information thrown at you goodness if you have any questions you can email me at Morgan at Morgan Brooks comm or you can find me on facebook at facebook.com slash Morgan Burks photography thanks so much for watching have a great day

Channel: Morgan Burks

Views: 223,012

Keywords: collage, make your own collage, how to make a collage in photoshop, make your own collage templates in photoshop, collage template

Id: Y6ChPAcZOKo

Length: 11min 30sec (690 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 19 2014