Summary: Bring more focus and attention to the subject of your photo and add excitement to your image by creating the illusion of a photo within the same photo.

Written by Steve Patterson
Exclusively for Photoshop Essentials.com.

Part of our complete collection of Photo Effects tutorials.

In this Photoshop Effects tutorial, we'll learn how to add excitement to a photo (not that your photos aren't exciting enough, of course) and bring more focus and attention to your main subject by creating the illusion of a smaller, cropped version of the image within itself. We'll be using a vector shape to create the dimensions of the smaller photo so we can easily rotate and resize it without any loss of image quality, adding a couple of layer styles to it, creating a clipping mask, sampling colors from the original photo, using Adjustment Layers, and adding a fun Radial Blur filter. Lots of good stuff. Any recent version of Photoshop will work just fine for this effect. I'll be using Photoshop CS3.

Here's the original image I'll be using for this tutorial:

And here's what we'll be working towards throughout the steps:

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Now that we know where we're headed, let's get started!