Film Strip Photo Collage in Photoshop - Part 1
Learn Photoshop with Photo Effects Tutorials at Photoshop Essentials.com
Step 11: Select The Path Selection Tool
Now that we've drawn our first notch, we can use it to add all the other notches along the top and bottom of the film strip without having to actually draw any of them! Select the Path Selection Tool from the Tools panel (the black arrow). You can also quickly select it by pressing the letter A on your keyboard:
With the Path Selection Tool selected, click inside the notch we just added. This will select the shape. You'll see a thin outline, along with anchor points (little squares) appear around it letting you know that the shape is selected:
Step 12: Drag Out A Copy Of The Shape
With the shape selected, hold down Shift+Alt (Win) / Shift+Option (Mac) and drag towards the right. The Alt / Option key tells Photoshop to create a copy of the shape as you drag, while the Shift key limits the direction you can drag in, making it easier to drag straight to the right and not on some weird angle. When you're done, release your mouse button to create a second notch along the top of the film strip:
Step 13: Drag Out Six More Copies Of The Shape
Continue dragging out more copies of the shape to create the remaining notches along the top of the film strip by holding down Shift+Alt (Win) / Shift+Option (Mac), clicking on the last shape you added, dragging a copy of it towards the right, then releasing your mouse button. Don't worry about the spacing for now, we'll fix that in a moment. You should have a total of eight notches along the top of the film strip when you're done:
Step 14: Select All Notches Along The Top Row
Once you've added all eight notches along the top row, hold down your Shift key and, with the Path Selection Tool still selected, click on each notch until you have all of them selected at once:
Step 15: Click The "Distribute Horizontal Centers" Option
With all notch shapes selected, click on the Distribute Horizontal Centers option up in the Options Bar:
This distributes the shapes evenly across the top of the film strip, correcting any spacing problems:
Step 16: Copy The Row Of Shapes Down To The Bottom Of The Film Strip
With all the notch shapes along the top row still selected, hold down Shift+Alt (Win) / Shift+Option (Mac) and drag the shapes down to the bottom border area of the film strip. Once again, the Alt / Option key tells Photoshop to make a copy of the shapes as we drag, while the Shift key limits the direction we can drag in, making it easy to drag straight down. You'll see an outline of the shapes appearing as you drag:
Once you have the shapes along the bottom border area, release your mouse button. Photoshop knocks the shape areas out of the bottom of the film strip, creating our second row of notches:
If we look at the shape layer in the Layers panel, we can see a thumbnail showing us a preview of what our shape looks like. This is called a vector mask thumbnail. You'll see a white highlight border around it, which tells us that the shape is currently selected. Click directly on the thumbnail to deselect the shape since we're done drawing it at this point. The white highlight border around the thumbnail will disappear:
