The above is a picture of my computer setup with the final wallpaper. Notice that there is more than one picture used to fill that space and how the wallpaper takes into account the gap between my screens (see the mountain outline).

Collecting the Pictures

So you’ll need a few pictures of a landscape (or even just outside your house); they’ll need to be overlapping each other so we can connect them. I went on a tramp last weekend up near Arthurs Pass (it’s in New Zealand if you wanted to search for it) and took a few photos.

Open up Photoshop and create a document big enough to fit in all of the photos you want to merge comfortably. The size I’ve used is 8000×2000 pixels (the .psd files can get quite large, mine ended up at 155MB) with three 2048×1536 pixel photos.

Merging the Pictures

Now we want to move the pictures on top of each other so there is one continuous image.

Set the opacity of the layers to 50% and move them around until they overlap each other correctly. This part might take a while if there aren’t many distinctive lines on the landscape. You’ll need to zoom in for this step.

Set the opacity of the layers back to 100%.

Touch ups

As you can see in the picture above there are dark lines at the boundaries between pictures. To fix this we’ll select the eraser tool with a soft 200 pixel head and remove those lines by erasing the sides of the picture on the top (leaving the bottom one showing through).

Finding the Gap

We’re just about ready to cut it up into a series of wallpapers but first we need to find out how many pixels the gap between our screens take up so we can allow for it.

Take out a ruler (yes, in the real world) and measure the gap between your screens: take note of this. Open a new document (500 pixels wide should do) and make sure it’s at zoom 100% and the ruler is on (Ctrl + R or View > Rulers if it’s not). Using that ruler measure along the pixel dimensions on the document so you can find out the equivalent in pixels.

Forming the Wallpapers

Make a selection of the size of your screens plus the gap. My screens are 1920×1200 each and the gap is 130px so I made a selection of 3970×1200 (or you can use the same ratio and then resize later).

Copy the selection, open a new document, paste and then make a selection of your screen size on the left (1920×1200 in my case). Copy and paste this selection into another document and save it as left.jpg (or similar). Do the same for the right side and the middle if you’ve got three screens etc. Note how you’ve missed out the gap section(s); these are ‘lost’ pixels that won’t show up in your wallpaper.

Now you just need to set the new images as your desktop wallpapers. I use DisplayFusion for dual screen.

No related posts.

First of all, we need to take a screenshot of something, I’m going to be taking a screenshot of PSDCORE. The easiest way to do this is to use an addon to your browser, if you’re using firefox, then I suggest using the FireShot addon. Alternatively you can use the print screen button on your keyboard, open a new document in Photoshop, and paste. If your screen is smaller, you won’t be able to see as much on the sides of the design (and vice versa), don’t worry about that.

Step 2

Now that we have our screenshot which is the size of your screen, we want to make it smaller, to do this go Image > Image Size. Because I want the end result to be 600 by 420 pixels, and later on we are going to be distorting this image, we need to have it a bit bigger than this – I have chosen a width of 700 pixels (and the height is automatically calculated).

Step 3

Thirdly, we are going to be creating the document to add our small screenshot into and add the effects to. Select all of the small screenshot (Ctrl + A) and copy it (Ctrl + C). Now create a new document 600 by 420 pixels, and paste the screenshot. You’ll notice that it doesn’t fit, and as mentioned before, that’s what we want.

Step 4

Now we are going to be distorting the image and putting it on an angle, to do this go Edit > Transform > Scale (Ctrl + T). You can now see the outline of the screenshot outside the document which is handy. Move the image to the center by left clicking in the rectangle and dragging.

Step 5

Right click your screenshot and go Distort, move the corners around until you get a desired effect (take a minute or two to familiarise yourself with the Distort tool if you havn’t done so before). Make sure that the outlines of the screenshot are all outside of the document, because otherwise you are going to have parts that are transparent/white (this is why we had a bigger screenshot that the document – to move it around).

Step 6

Now we are going to be blurring our screenshot, and then make our focal point clear. To do this, duplicate your layer by going Layer > Duplicate Layer (Ctrl + J). Now go Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur with a radius of 2 pixels.

Step 7

To unblur our focal point, we are going to erase part of the blurred layer using the erase tool (making the clear layer underneath to be seen). Select the erase tool, and using a large soft brush with an opacity of 50%, unblur about 1/3 of the layer about your focal point.

Step 8

Now set the opacity of the erase tool 100% and erase in a smaller area about your focal point, this gives you a two-toned blur effect. To check out some more examples that you can do with this effect check out my last post on my favorite CSS galleries.

Related posts:

1. Widescreen Wallpaper from Merging Photos
2. Simple Professional Logo