Written By Steve Patterson

In this Photoshop tutorial, we're going to learn how easy it is to turn any photo into an interesting background using a couple of basic selection tools in Photoshop that, quite honestly, seem to serve no other purpose other than helping us to create this effect. I'm talking about the Single Row Marquee Tool and the Single Column Marquee Tool, which by default are hiding behind the Rectangular Marquee Tool in the Tools palette. Even Adobe doesn't seem to consider them very useful, since they're two of only a handful of tools in the Tools palette that don't have a keyboard shortcut associated with them. Yet as we'll see in this tutorial, when it comes to creating simple backgrounds or wallpaper in Photoshop, these two selection tools are hard to beat.

At the end of the tutorial, we'll see how we can easily combine our newly-created background with the same photo we created it from, which gives us a nice effect since the background and the photo share the same colors.

You can use this technique to turn any photo into a background or wallpaper. The photo itself will be unrecognizable when you're done, so it really doesn't matter which photo you use. The only thing you may want to take into consideration is how colorful you want your background to be. The more colorful the photo, the more colorful the background.

Here's the photo I'll be using:

Let's get started!

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Photo Backgrounds:Step 1: Duplicate The Background Layer

As always, we want to avoid doing any work on our original image, so before we do anything else, we need to duplicate our Background layer. To do that, use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac). If I look in my Layers palette, I can see that I now have two layers - the Background layer on the bottom which contains my original photo, and "Layer 1", which is a copy of the Background layer, above it:

Photo Backgrounds:Step 2: Select The Single Column Marquee Tool

In the Tools palette, click and hold your mouse down on the Rectangular Marquee Tool. After a second or two, a fly-out menu will appear, showing you all the tools that are hiding behind it. Select the Single Column Marquee Tool from the bottom of the list:

Photo Backgrounds:Step 3: Click Inside The Image To Select A Single Column Of Pixels

The Single Column Marquee Tool gets its name from the fact that it does one thing and one thing only - it selects a single column of pixels. Click anywhere inside your image and Photoshop will select the specific pixel you clicked on, along with every other pixel above and below it from top to bottom. Keep in mind that your selection will only be one pixel wide, so if you want your background to contain as many different colors from the photo as possible, you'll want to click on an area that has a good assortment of colors above and below it. I'm going to click on the right side of the girl's face (her left, our right), which will select quite a few different colors from top to bottom:

Photo Backgrounds:Step 4: Copy The Selection To A New Layer

Now that we have our single column of pixels selected, we need to copy it to a new layer. We can use the same keyboard shortcut we used a moment ago when we duplicated the Background layer. Just press Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac) and Photoshop will copy the column of pixels to a new layer above "Layer 1":

Photo Backgrounds:Step 5: Stretch The Column Across The Entire Image With Free Transform

Here's where we make the first part of our background. We're going to take that single column of pixels and stretch it out to fill the entire image. For that, we'll use Photoshop's Free Transform command. Use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+T (Win) / Command+T (Mac) to bring up the Free Transform box and handles around the column of pixels. Then simply move your mouse cursor close to the column until you see it turn into two small arrows, one pointing left and the other pointing right. Click your mouse and drag the column to the right. You'll see the column become a repeating pattern of color as you drag:

Continue dragging out the pattern until you reach the right side of the photo. Then move your mouse cursor to the left side of the Free Transform box, and then click and drag out the pattern across the left side of the image:

Once you've covered the entire photo with the pattern from left to right, press Enter (Win) / Return (Mac ) to accept the transformation and exit out of the Free Transform command. You're image should now look something like this:

The first part of our background is done, and you could stop here if you wanted, but on the next page, we're going to continue on to make our background even more interesting.