Turn Photo Into A Jigsaw Puzzle

PREVIEW

Jigsaw puzzle is fun. Even more so when the pieces you’re about to assemble is your photo itself. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to make an easy and cool jigsaw puzzle effect of a photo. Easy indeed that you can remember and do it at once for yourself. There are variations actually in creating such effect. I’ll explain that along the way. Let’s get started then…

Step 1. Open your photo in Photoshop. You can see in the layers palette that a Background is created. Make a copy of this by right-clicking the Background layer, then select Duplicate layer, or via the shortcut Ctrl+J.

Step 2. Create a new layer by clicking the icon below the layers palette, just beside the trash bin. Put this layer (which is now layer 2) between the Background and Layer 1, then fill it with white color (Edit>Fill…). This will serve as our backdrop as we make the pieces in the process. You can have any color, gradient, texture, or pattern you want. Not much of importance, not unless you prefer not to fill all the canvas with rectangles, so that parts of the background is visible.

Step 3. Time to make the first rectangle. So, click Layer 1 to activate it, then select the Rectangular Marquee Tool to draw a rectangle anywhere on your photo.

Step 4. Create a layer mask on the above layer (e.g. Layer 1). The selected area via the Rectangular Marquee Tool will now come into view. Going pretty good. One piece down. So make another one…

Note : Include this in Step 4. I almost forgot about the border of the rectangle. I used the Outer Glow here (click fx below the layers palette then choose Outer Glow, size 3-5, depending on the size of your photo, color white). Another way is the Stroke style which you can choose Color, Gradient, or Pattern for your border. The latter offers you more options. You can also transform the rectangles in any size and position you want thru Transform Selection (Select>Transform Selection…).

Step 5. Duplicate Layer 1 (which is already masked), but before doing, click first the chain between the image and mask icons to unlink it. In so doing, you’re making a copy of the layer without the same selected mask. Otherwise, you’re just copying the same image.

Step 6. Done with duplicating Layer 1, click the mask thumbnail first, then drag the image (actually transparent rectangular layer on top of the first image) to a desired area. You can freely place anywhere you want in the canvas.

Step 7. The rest is easy. Do the same process as above to make more rectangles until it fills out all your photo, or, to your desired output. That’s just it!

Here is another variation using the Stroke instead of the Outer Glow:

Stroke