Roman Poster

Here is a great way of turning some of your images in to a poster with that classic Roman touch - the mosaic tiles

Open the 'roman poster originl.jpg' image in Photoshop Elements and from the tool bar select the freehand lasso. Now dragging it around the image just inside the border, it doesn't matter how rough it is as we what to give the impression of a broken mosaic floor. Once the lasso has joined up go to Edit in the Menu bar and select Copy then chose Edit Paste. This will Paste our selection in as a new layer - by default named Layer 1

Clicking back on our Background Layer from the Edit menu select Fill and from the drop down menu under the Contents Use: select White and click OK. This will fill our Background Layer with white.

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Working on Layer1 we can use Layer Styles palette found in the options bar palette well to give it more definition from the background layer . Clicking on the Layer Styles tab will open the palette, and from the drop down menu select Drop Shadows. We can now experiment by clicking on the various icons High, Noisy etc. but for this image Low was chosen.

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Duplicate Layer 1 by dragging over the Create a new Layer icon so we are now working on Layer 1 copy. To apply the mosaic effect go to Filter >Texture> Stained Glass. Setting the amounts to around Cell size 8, Border Thickness 4 and Light Intensity 4 then press OK. To bring back a little more definition to our image try reducing the Opacity in the Layers palette to around 59% this will blend it with beneath, Layer 1. Tip...The colour of the border will depend on your foreground colour in the tool bar - gold was selected from our image.

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To add the text to our image select the text tool from the tool box and set the foreground colour to a colour of your choice in this case red. Click down and the text layer will appear in the layers palette Layer 2 and we can type in the text of our choice. Now click on the tick on the options bar to accept the text. The text layer will now show the first few words of the text. The font, size and even colour of of text can all be changed in the options bar

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To make the text even more prominent we can use the Layer Styles palette. Bevel was selected from the drop down menu Simple Inner selected. For the halo effect around the text Outer Glows was chosen from the drop down menu and set to Heavy which really makes the text stand out. It is well worth experimenting with the options under the Layer Styles as they can really help to improve your images.

Our finished image of the Roman poster - Roll your cursor over the image to see the difference