Written By Steve Patterson

In this Photoshop effects tutorial, we're going to look at how to easily create a Photoshop puzzle effect, allowing us to turn any photo into a jigsaw puzzle! Or at least, we'll be creating the illusion that the photo is made up of small puzzle pieces, although I suppose you could print the photo afterwards, cut around all the pieces with scissors and make an actual puzzle out of it, but as I like to say, why fumble around with reality when faking things in Photoshop is so much easier.

As we'll see, much of the work for our puzzle effect has already been done for us thanks to Photoshop's Texturizer filter and a free texture that Photoshop ships with, although we'll need to load the texture in ourselves, which we'll learn how to do. We're going to take things a bit further than that, though, and see how to make it look as if some of the pieces are still missing, giving our puzzle a "work in progress" appearance.

I should mention up front that while this photo effect is very easy to do, some of this tutorial involves using the Pen Tool, and since explaining how the Pen Tool works in Photoshop would require its own separate tutorial, I'm going to assume here that you're already familiar with how to use it. The good news is, the Pen Tool does have it's own separate tutorial, so if you do need help with the Pen Tool, be sure to check out our complete Making Selections With The Pen Tool tutorial which you can find in our Photoshop Basics section.

Here's the photo I'll be using for this tutorial, a little guy who's obviously pretty psyched about having his photo turned into a puzzle:

And here's how it will look with our Photoshop puzzle effect applied:

Let's get started!

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Step 1: Duplicate The Background Layer

With our photo newly opened in Photoshop, the first thing we need to do is make a copy of our Background layer, which is the layer that contains our photo and is currently the only layer we have. Making a copy of this layer will allow us to do whatever we want to our image without harming it, since we'll always have the original on the Background layer to fall back on if needed. The easiest way to make a copy of a layer is by using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac). If we look in our Layers palette after pressing the keyboard shortcut, we can see that we now have two layers. The original Background layer is on the bottom, and a copy of the layer, which Photoshop has automatically named "Layer 1", is sitting above it:

Step 2: Rename The New Layer "Puzzle"

An excellent habit to get into when working in Photoshop is to give your layers more descriptive names. This may not seem so important when you're only working with a few layers, but it's not uncommon to find yourself suddenly working with 50 layers, 100 layers or more, and if all of your layers have names like "Layer 1", "Layer 56" and "Layer 83 Copy 4", you'll be kicking yourself for not taking a few seconds to give your layers more helpful and descriptive names. In this case, we'll be using "Layer 1" as our main puzzle effect, so I'm going to double-click directly on the layer's name and rename it "Puzzle":

Press Enter (Win) / Return (Mac) when you're done to accept the name change.

Step 3: Add A New Blank Layer Below The "Puzzle" Layer

Next, we need to add a new blank layer below the "Puzzle" layer so it appears between the "Puzzle" layer and the Background layer. Currently, we have the "Puzzle" layer selected in the Layers palette. We know it's selected because it's highlighted in blue. Normally, whenever we add a new layer, Photoshop automatically places it above whichever layer is currently selected, so if we were to click on the New Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette right now, we'd end up with a new blank layer above the "Puzzle" layer. That's not what we want, so here's a handy trick. Hold down your Ctrl (Win) / Command (Mac) key and click on the New Layer icon:

By adding the Ctrl/Command key to the step, we tell Photoshop to add a new layer and place it below the currently selected layer. We can see in the Layers palette now that we have a new blank layer, again named "Layer 1", sitting between the "Puzzle" and Background layers:

Step 4: Fill The New Layer With Black

This layer is going to be used as the background for our effect, and I'm going to use black as my background color, at least for now, which means I need to fill this layer with black (Later on, we'll see how to change the background color if needed). Photoshop has a command built specifically for such a task, and it just happens to be called the Fill command. You'll find it by going up to the Edit menu at the top of the screen and choosing Fill:

This brings up the Fill dialog box. Set the Contents option at the top of the dialog box to Black, then click OK to exit out of the dialog box:

Nothing will appear to have happened in our document window, since the photo on the "Puzzle" layer is blocking everything else from view at the moment, but if we look at the layer preview thumbnail for "Layer 1" in the Layers palette, which gives us a small preview of what's on the layer, we can see that "Layer 1" has in fact been filled with black:

In keeping with what I said a moment ago about renaming layers, I'm going to double-click directly on this layer's name ("Layer 1") and rename it "Background color":

Step 5: Select The "Puzzle" Layer Once Again

We're going to be creating our puzzle pieces next, but we'll need to have the correct layer selected and at the moment, we don't. We have the "Background color" layer selected, but it's the "Puzzle" layer we need, so click on the "Puzzle" layer in the Layers palette to select it:

We're now ready to convert out photo into a puzzle!