Written By Steve Patterson, Photoshop Essentials.com

In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, we'll learn how to add excitement to a photo (not that your photos aren't exciting enough, of course) and bring more focus and attention to your main subject by creating the illusion of a smaller, cropped version of the image within itself. We'll be using a vector shape to create the dimensions of the smaller photo so we can easily rotate and resize it without any loss of image quality, adding a couple of layer styles to it, creating a clipping mask, sampling colors from the original photo, using Adjustment Layers, and adding a fun Radial Blur filter. Lots of good stuff. Any recent version of Photoshop will work just fine for this effect. I'll be using Photoshop CS3.

Here's the original image I'll be using for this tutorial:

And here's what we'll be working towards throughout the steps:

Now that we know where we're headed, let's get started!

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