Harry Potter Montage

This took me three days on Photoshop.  But it looks pretty cool! 

Here’s how to do it.

1) Open the picture with the shape you want to use for a pattern.
2) Press ctrl J to copy the background. Create a new layer and fill it with a color or a gradient where the two colors are really close in hue.
3) Place the color layer below the background copy layer.
4) Get the pen tool and set the option to shape. Now draw the outline of your subject. (This doesn’t have to be a perfect outline just somewhat close to the general shape of the subject.)
5) Lower the opacity of the shape layer to about 40% then lock both the shape layer and the background copy layer so you don’t accidentally make changes to them.
6) Get the type tool and click at the bottom of your image. Choose a blocky font so you will have more shape to work with and type your word or phrase.
7) Go to layer-type-convert to shape. Now go to edit-transform-warp. Now you can adjust and shape the text as you like. (You can also do this with individual letters instead of whole words.)
8) Select the layer with the individual letter then use the direct selection tool to push and pull the anchor points.
9) Keep building the words and phrases in the image.
10) For some variety by selecting the text shape layer then choose stroke in the layer style menu. Choose your color and thickness. Click OK. Then lower the opacity to 0%.
11) When you have the shape all filled merge all the text layers together. Go to layer-layer style-gradient overlay. Choose your colors.
12) Open a texture picture. Place the texture over your image. Then press ctrl + shift + U and set the blend mode to overlay.
13) Finally create a new layer set a foreground color that matches the colors you have already chosen and set the background color to #000000. Go to filter-render-clouds and set the layer to overlay and the opacity to about 40%.

*Sometimes you can’t merge the shape layer, so you have a ton of layers, and Photoshop may quit working.  To solve this, right click on a shape layer and select “group to layers”, or something like that.  You can then drag all the shape layers into the group.  Right click on the group heading and select merge group.  The layers will all be glued together, and take up lots less space.