The "Digital Deviations" forum doesn't get as much attention as it should...so I thought I'd post a photo effect and ask you to post one of yours! Perhaps we'll all pick up a thing or two to add something new to our bag of tricks! Here the effect...
The Collage
Now, I've done this kind of thing by hand...and let me tell you it can really take some time! Select, copy to new layer, select, copy to new layer....then select, inverse, modify, border, select, inverse, modify, border....it gets tedious!
Getting the Effect Yourself
Well, PanosF/X makes it easy with
The B&Big Picture! Just save this free PhotoShop action to a place on your computer (can be anywhere) and then load the action into PS for easy collage work!
I converted the image to black and white myself. Color or B&W, the action will simply take a photograph and chops it up for you. It puts the little white borders around the edges of each mini photo and creates the "bend" in the photos complete with shadows. While the default is to display on a grey background, you can change the canvas to any other color or (as I have done here) remove the canvas completely for a transparent image that will look nice on any color site!
Each mini photo is created in its own layer, so it's real easy to change any of the mini photos. For example, the original effect returned a grid of 25 photos. I hid all of the photos that had only background to leave behind what you see here. I also manually transformed a few of the photos to give it slightly less of an organized look.
PanosF/X has a ton of free effects from puzzle pieces to Rubik's cubes and artistic edges to photos. They do sell commercial versions of some of their tools, but a lot of it is completely free!
Your Turn
Have a favorite free effect you'd like to share?