How to Transform Photo into Jigsaw Puzzle

In this tutorial, I m going to show you how to create this great Jigsaw puzzle effect using a free plugin from Adobe, as well as how to create your own pattern background. Let the fun begins.

Step 1

Open the image you'd like to make into the puzzle. Go to Window - Find Extensions on Exchange the Adobe add-ons page will open. If you are not already signed into your Creative Cloud account, Adobe will ask you to sign in. Scroll down and click on "Photoshop" at the left. In the search field, type in "puzzle" and press enter. When the page opens click on install.

In your download folder, you can find the zip file that says "puzzlepieces". Doble-click it to open the file and open the "puzzle pieces" folder. Click "puzzle.atn". Immediately, in the action panel, you'll see a set of actions named puzzle. You have 20 actions in the set. Each action will cut out between 2 and 192 puzzle pieces on a separate layer. There are separate actions for different aspect ratios and sizes within them.

Step 2

For this tutorial, I'll click 96 pieces on a 12 x 8-inch puzzle, we want to crop our image to that size. Open your crop tool and type into the width and height fields the same size as listed in the action you chose. Make sure Delete Cropped Pixels is checked, click the check-mark to crop your image.

Step 3

Click the play button to play the puzzle action. Since the puzzle, I chose for this tutorial has 96 pieces, there'll be 96 separate layers created in the layer panel. When the last piece of the puzzle is finished, a message will appear. If you want, you can adjust the drop shadow or bevel. I'm happy with the settings, so I press Continue and OK.

Step 4

Now that we made our puzzle, it's time to make space all around it, so we can add our background behind our puzzle. Go to Image - Canvas Size. Your canvas size should be the same as the image size (12-8in). We will add 7-8 inches all around the puzzle. We can crop it after if we want.

Step 5

Now I am going to show you how to make a pattern from any image. Open the image that you wish to use as a pattern. Click on move tool (V), go to Edit and Define pattern. Name it whatever you'd like and click OK.

Go to the puzzle document and in the layer panel, scroll to the bottom, make your background active and click the adjustment layer icon. Click Pattern and click OK.

For this project, I a using the Photoshop pattern grass. You can see in the picture below hove to find photoshop patterns.

Step 6

Now we will start to re-positioning individual puzzle pieces. Continue to move pieces until your happy with the positions.

Step 7

Next, we will add a Drop Shadow to the entire puzzle. First group all the puzzle pieces into a folder. Click the "FX" icon and click drop shadow. Change the Blending Mode to Linear Burn, Opacity 40%, uncheck Global Light, Angel: 90, Distance: 12 px, Size: 15 px.

Click Bevel & Emboss, Style: Inner Bevel, Technique is Smooth, Depth 100%, Direction Up, uncheck Global Light, Size; 4px, Angel: 143, Altitude: 30. Make the Highlights Mode to Linear Dodge the Opacity 80%, the Shadow Blending Mode is Multiply and its Opacity 50%.

 Step 8

Merge all layers using shortcuts, press and hold the Shift key + Ctrl + Alt + E. This will make a stamp of all layers (non-destructive way to merge layers). Next, we will angel our puzzle in perspective. Go to the bottom corner and drag it out until you like its perspective.

And that's it, folks we are done. Thanks for reading the article I hope you liked it, and we’ll read on in the next one.😅😅