Polaroid wallpaper

Step 1:

Open this polaroid wallpaper example to see what we are going to create in this tutorial.

As mentioned earlier I will create a polaroid wallpaper in this tutorial, however you can use this tutorial to create a wallpaper consisting of picture frames or anything of your choice.

In this step we will create the shape that will be used for the polaroid frame.
Make shore the Foreground color is set to white and select the Rectangle tool from the tools window and draw a rectangle of whatever size you want.
Now we are going to subtract some space from the polaroid where the picture will be visible, select Subtract from shape area in the Rectangle tool options .
Draw the rectangle where the picture will be visible inside the current rectangle.
When you have done this you will have a shape that looks something like the image below.

Step 2:

Now it's time to make this shape look like an actual polaroid, I’m not aiming at a very realistic look here but rather I want something that will look good on my desktop.
Right click the layer where you have your shape and select Blending options, we are only going to use Drop Shadow and Color Overlay for this look, and you can see my settings in the two images bellow.

Step 3:

Ok now we have something that looks like a polaroid frame, now we are going to combine it with a nice photo or other art to turn in to a simplistic and clean wallpaper.
There is two ways of turning this polaroid template into several polaroid’s to form the wallpaper, which one to use depends on the number polaroid’s you want.

Method 1: This method is suited for a small number of elements, simply duplicate the original layer until you have the number of elements you want and then align them by dragging them around.

Method 2: This method is suited if you want a large number of elements, rasterize your shape by right clicking it's layer and select Rasterize layer. Now copy all the content in the layer and create a new document with a transparent background, paste the content and go to Edit > Define pattern. Close the new document and in the original document create a new layer and go to Edit > Fill, select the pattern you just defined. Then simply remove the items you don’t want with the selection tools.

Step 4:

I only wanted four elements for my wallpaper background so I went with the first method.
Now its time for the fun part, insert the image that you want to be inside your polaroid’s and place the image layer underneath all the polaroid layers.
Move the image around until you think it looks good, when you are happy with the position it's time to remove the parts of the image that's outside the polaroid’s.

Step 5:

Use the Rectangular Marquee tool to make a selection around the image hole in every polaroid frame, hold down shift to make several selections at once. Invert the selection by hitting Alt + s + i.
In the image layer you now hit delete and nothing except the parts inside the polaroid frames should be left.

The result:

Bellow is an example that I have made so that you all can get a good idea of what you can expect. Here is an example of how a polaroid wallpaper can look in original size