Summary: Learn how to create the illusion that a portrait photo is actually being created by multiple lines of type in this photo effects tutorial.

Written by Steve Patterson
Exclusively for Photoshop Essentials.com.

Part of our complete collection of Photo Effects tutorials.

In this Photoshop Effects tutorial, we're going to look at another movie poster-type of effect. We're going to learn how to create the illusion that a piece of a photo is torn away to reveal another photo underneath it. I saw this effect used in a poster for a tv show on the FX Network, and when I realized how easy it would be to do something similar in Photoshop, well, here we are.

To create the effect, we'll be colorizing one photo and converting the second one to black and white, then adding some noise, enhancing shadows and highlights, and using a few layer masks to blend it all together.

I'm going to use this same photo from one of our other recent tutorials, Create An Optical Illusion By Filling A Photo With More Photos, because it works perfectly for the effect we're going for here:

I'm also going to be using this photo, or more specifically, the guy from this photo:

And here's the final effect we'll be working towards:

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Let's get started.

Step 1: Crop The Main Photo Around The Person's Face

I'm going to start by working on the photo of the woman, which is going to be the photo that ends up with a piece torn out of it, and the first thing I'm going to do is crop the photo so that all I'm left with is the area around her head. I'll use the Crop Tool for this, so I'll grab my Crop Tool from the Tools palette:

I could also press C to quickly access it with the keyboard shortcut. Then I'm simply going to click and drag out a selection around the woman's head, making sure her face ends up in the center of my selection:

When I'm happy with my selection, I'll press Enter (Win) / Return (Mac) to accept it, and Photoshop will crop the image for me: