Collage Of Warped Photos In Photoshop

Step 18: Paint With White To Add Highlights To The Image

Once you're done painting in some shadows, press the letter X on your keyboard to swap your Foreground and Background colors so white becomes your Foreground color.

Then just as you did for the shadows, simply paint over a few areas to add some highlights, changing your brush size and edge hardness as needed.

Here, I'm painting a very subtle white highlight area in the bottom left corner of the image:

The highlights aren't as noticeable in my image since I'm painting over an area that is already fairly bright. They may be more noticeable in your image, but even a very subtle highlight still adds to the effect and keeps the image from looking flat.

When you're done painting your shadows and highlights, press Ctrl+D (Win) / Command+D (Mac) to deselect the selection around the image.

Step 19: Adjust The Layer Opacity If Needed

If you find that your shadows and highlights are a bit too subtle in your image, go back to the Opacity option in the top right corner of the Layers palette and increase the layer opacity until you're happy with how they look. Or if you think your shadows and highlights are too strong, lower the opacity slightly. Either way, you shouldn't need to adjust the opacity amount by much, since even small adjustments have a big impact with the layer set to the Hard Light blend mode. I'm going to fine-tune my shadows and highlights by increasing my layer opacity to 22%:

Here's my image now with my shadows and highlights added:

Step 20: Group The Three Layers That Make Up The Image

We've completed our work on our first photo! All we need to do now is add it to our main collage document (which we'll open in a moment). Right now, our image is made up of three separate layers - the main image on "Layer 0 copy", the main shadow below it on "Layer 0", and the highlights and shadows on "Layer 2" at the top. Rather than dragging three separate layers into the main collage document, let's make things easier by grouping the layers so all three of them will be placed inside a "folder" in the Layers palette. That way, we can simply drag the folder over to the collage document instead of dragging three separate layers. This will also make it easier to keep our main collage document organized when we start adding additional photos to it.

To create the layer group, since "Layer 2" is currently selected in the Layers palette, hold down Shift and click on "Layer 0". This will select both "Layer 0" and "Layer 0 copy" above it while keeping "Layer 2" at the top selected, so all three layer will then be selected (in previous versions of Photoshop, you would need to link the layers together rather than selecting them like this):

With all three layer selected, either go up to the Layer menu at the top of the screen and select Group Layers or simply use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+G (Win) / Command+G (Mac). Whichever way you choose, Photoshop adds all three layers into a new group. If you look in your Layers palette, you'll see that the three layers seem to have disappeared, replaced by a folder icon with the name "Group 1" beside it. Double-click directly on the words "Group 1" and rename the group something more descriptive like "Photo 1":

If you look closely, you'll see a small, right-pointing triangle to the left of the folder icon. Click on it to twirl the folder open, and you'll see your three layers appear inside of it:

Click on the triangle once again to close group, leaving only the folder visible.