The Sprague Lab

Okay, as promised, here is how to make this cool 4-square photo:
I put one of these on a paper layout I did for my HOF entry this year. I think they are really cool, and a great way to add a little journalistic AND artistic flair at the same time.

For this PS Friday, we’ll still be focusing on the marquee tool, but we’re going to create a compound selection, rather than just a simple square or circle.

1. Open 4 photos.
2. Do the editing you want to them.
3. Open a new 12x12 blank document, and drag all of your photos onto it.
4. Turn on the rulers. (View > Rulers)
5. Use the Edit > Scale command (or in PSE, just drag the handles) until each photo is no larger than 4 inches in width. (this just determines how much of the photo you’ll be able to see - you can go more or less here)

Let’s make this a 6-inch accent.

1. Select the Elliptical marquee tool.
2. In the Options bar at the top of the screen, select Fixed Size from the Style dropdown box. Type in 6 and 6 in the size boxes to get a perfect 6-inch circle.
3. Click once anywhere in your document to see a perfect 6-inch circle.
   
4. With the marquee tool selected, move the selection up into the top corner, right next to the rulers. This will make the cutting easier. Let’s turn on the Grid (View > Show > Grid), and also the Snap feature, which turns our ruler lines into little magnets. (Also, if you have CS or CS2, you can drag a guide line out to the 3-inch mark both horizontally and vertically, so you can line up your cutting marquee)

What we actually want is a quarer-circle pie shape. So let’s make a compound selection.

1. Select the Rectangle marquee tool (while the circle selection is still active).
2. Now hold down the Alt key. You should see a little minus sign appear next to the cursor. This means that whatever you select now will actually erase from your current selection.
3. Click and drag while you hold the Alt key - a rectangle covering over half of your circle. When you release the mouse, you’ll see that you’ve actually cut your selection in half.
4. Now let’s do the horizontal cut. Hold down the Alt key, and drag a rectangle across the bottom half of your selection, right at the 3-inch grid line. Just before you release your mouse, you should see something like this: (See the minus-sign cursor?)
   

Selection
So now you have your quarter-pie selection.

1. With the marquee tool still selected, drag the selection over your photo, target it in the layers palette.
   
2. Now go to Select > Inverse, and hit Delete to delete the excess photo.

Congratulations! You have your first pie slice done! :)

Finishing up, for PSE:
If you have PSE, you’ll need to re-draw the circle and create the compound selection for each of the pie shapes (top right, bottom right, bottom left). Then simply Select > Inverse, target the second photo layer, and hit Delete, and so on until you have each quadrant done.

Finishing up, for PSCS and above:
If you have PSCS or above, you have a cool feature in your selection tools: Transform selection. With your selection still active, go to Select > Inverse to return to your original pie-shaped selection. Now you can go to Select > Transform selection, and use the rotation handles to rotate your selection (hold Shift while you rotate to constrain to 45 or 90 degrees). Then Select > Inverse, target the second photo layer, and hit Delete.

So you can go through and cut each quadrant of your circle.

Final Touches

Let’s target the bottom right photo in the Layers palette.
Now let’s move the Opacity slider in the Layers palette to somthing like 40% (more or less depending on the original lightness of the photo).

Now we can add some text to this area. If you want to journal here, that would be fun, or you can simply put a subtitle or a date.

Here’s how mine ended up:

This also looks GREAT printed out and cut in the circle shape with just a teeny bit of white photo paper showing around the edge. Hybrid scrapping at its best! :D

Have a great night!