Today i will show you how to turn a photo in a collage of polaroids. The cool thing about this is that you can use this effect for all kind of different types of images. This is a easy tutorial with a lot of repeating actions.

STEP 1
We start of by opening the picture you would like to edit.
I used a night shot photo of the eiffel tower that can be downloaded here.

STEP 2
First we need to duplicate the background layer, right click the layer and click Duplicate Layer or click “CTRL + J”.

Create a third layer by clicking “CTRL + SHIFT + N” or click the new layer icon, and call the layer “black” now put the “black layer” below “layer 1”.

STEP 3
We need to fill the new “black layer” with black, be sure you have set the foreground color to #000000, press “G” to select the “Paint Bucket Tool” and click on the photo. Be sure you have the “black layer” selected.

Now press “CTRL + SHIFT + N” to create a new layer (call it visible) and put it above the black layer.

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STEP 4
Now we will make a selection using the Rectangular Marquee Tool, press “M” to select the Rectangular Marquee Tool.

Drag out a selection inside your image like i did below, which will become the first polaroid.

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Now fill the selection with black by using the Paint Bucked Tool “press G, remember be sure you have selected the “visible layer”. Your layer panel will now look something like this.

STEP 5
We will now create a clipping mask”, this means that the layer above it, “Layer 1” which contains the copy of our image, is going to be “clipped” by our filled selection on the layer below it “visible layer”. You can do this by selecting “Layer 1” and pressing CTRL + ALT + G. You will now only see the square you have created earlier.

STEP 6
Create a new layer (CTRL + SHIFT + N) between the “black layer” and the “visible layer” and call it border. Now select the “border layer” and create a new selection using the Rectangular Marquee Tool (press M) that will be the border of the first Polaroid, remember polaroids have a bigger border on the bottom of the photo.

Fill the border with white, be sure you have the “border layer” selected. To fill the border use the Paint Bucket Tool again (press G) and set the foreground color to white #FFFFFF.

STEP 7
Now double click the “border layer” to open the Layer Style and set the Drop Shadow as shown below.

You will not see any shadow yet, dont worry about it yet.

STEP 8
To make the polaroids look more interesting, we will rotate the polaroids a little bit.
To do this simple select the “border layer” and the “”visible layer” by holding CTRL and clicking both layers in the layer panel.

Now (press CTRL + T) to activate the Free Transform Tool, and rotate the polaroid a little bit.

STEP 9
Select the layers: border, visible and Layer 1. And press “CTRL + G”. You will now see you have created a layer group with the 3 layers in it.

We have created a Layer Group because we would like to create more polaroids, and by duplicating this layer group we are actually duplicating the already created polaroid.

So duplicate “Group 1” by right clicking the group, and click Duplicate Group…

You will now see a second Group called Group 1 copy.

So now we have a second polaroid.

STEP 10
Now open the new polaroid and select the “”border” and “visible” layer.

Press (CTRL + T) to open the Free Transfrom Tool, drag/rotate the polaroid till you are happy with the look.

You can see the drop shadow we have created in step 7.

STEP 11
Now repeat step 9 and step 10 to create as many polaroids as you want.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial, please leave a comment with your end result.

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