To begin, you will need a template. Since many of you may not have one, we will build a simple one.

Open a new document, 12 X 12 at 300 ppi. Set your selection to Fixed Size Style, and a width of 1 inch, length of 1 inch. Make a selection on your new document and fill with black.

Duplicate this black square until you have 12 black squares. Arrange the black squares until you have them in three rows of four each, keeping an even space between each square. It helps to turn on the grid, set the grid to 1.25 inch squares and then turning on the snap to grid option.

The snap to option can be found under the menu command view and setting the size of your grid is in the Edit> Preferences command. Notice the grid preferences will automatically adjust to 1.099 - that's OK, we just want the grid to allow us to place the squares in an even manner.

Once you have your black squares arranged, go ahead and color code the layers by right clicking on the eye of each layer and scrolling down to blue. Any of the colors will work, but here I will use blue. This will help later on. You also can turn off the grid and the snap to feature.

The area the black squares is kind of small, lets make them all bigger. Turn on your rulers and drag down guides* to make a square that is 6 inches wide by 4 inches tall. We will use that as a reference point. Select all the layers of the black squares by holding down the shift key and clicking on the top layer and then the bottom layer. Then go to Edit>Transform>Scale and drag out the size of the squares until they match the width of the guides. If you use the same settings as I did, they will be a little taller than the 4 inches set by the guide.

*note: to drag down guides, hold down your mouse on the ruler and drag and a guide will follow your mouse. You can drag a guides from the top ruler and from the side rulers and make as many guides as you wish.

Now we have our basic template for the split window technique. Drag the guides off the work canvas and it will delete them. Turn off the rulers to give yourself more room to work. Save your work right now. You might even want to save an extra as this is a template that can be used over and over again. You might want to adjust the tilt of some of the squares and maybe distort a few to give interest to the final product. But, if you follow this tutorial you will be able to do that later.

Now it is time to choose a photo to use for this technique. You will not want to use a head shot for this technique but most other photos will work just fine. For our tutorial I choose to use this photo.

Now, we are going to make a photo sandwich. Being careful not to move the photo on your canvas, duplicate the layer with the photo until you have twelve copies. Place a photo layer above each of the layers with a black square. Your layers should then be photo layer on top, black square layer, photo layer, black square layer, and so on.

Next, clip each photo layer to the black square layer beneath it. You can do this by right clicking on the photo layer and scrolling down to create clipping mask.Now, our photo is beginning to look like a split window is between us and it. You can stop here and have a nice split window photo.

But, if you want to make the image a little more interesting, keep going.

Determine the layer that holds the square of the image you wish to expand. ONLY ADJUST THE SQUARE layers, NOT THE PHOTO layers. It would not hurt to lock the photo layers in place so you do not accidentally move them or adjust them. Use the Edit>transform>scale command to adjust the width and length of the square, the photo that is clipped to the square will stay in place,, but by adjusting the square and its position, you are adjusting the portion of the photo that is being clipped to the square. Here, I only adjusted the square and the photo of the flower was revealed as a whole.

Adjust the main part of the image first without worrying about overlap and spacing.

After the main image has been adjusted, then go back and adjust the other squares to fill the blanks left and remove the overlap. Notice how I had change the ratios of the squares to make it all fit. The bottom of square #2 had to be drawn up in order not to overlap the center image. Then square #1 had to be drawn out to take up the space left, then since that made them both over lap, I had to draw out the left side of square #2 and drag down the top of square #1 - All very confusing to someone reading this I know. Then there is the matter of square #3 - Well the idea is that you play around with the squares like a jig saw puzzle - BE SURE not to move or change the size of the photo layers, and you really are not moving the squares, you are just changing their shapes.

So here is my final version. I made an effort to keep the flowers from being cut up. If you had a photo with a face in it you would want to keep the face from being cut up. But, there is an easier way of doing that.

This is a different template - I made five rectangles, one inch wide and four inches high. Then I placed them using a grid set to 1.25 squares. As you can see the photo has already been duplicated and the layers sandwiched so that it is ready for us to fiddle with. I am unhappy about the faces being sliced, so I want to show you how to fix that.

In the layer palette, select all the photo layers by holding down the control key and clicking on each of them. Be sure you do not have the rectangle layers selected. Now, you can move the photos around to see if you can find a more pleasing look.

Just as in real life, these two characters are not cooperating. If I get one face within a rectangle, the other becomes sliced.

Keeping all the photo layers selected, go to Edit>Transform>Scale. Make sure to hold down the shift key, and drag the corners of the photos to see if you can remedy the problem. There, now that is better. It has a slimming affect on these dudes, don't ya think?

Since all I had to do to these photos was to change their scale, I could have just used ONE photo on top and merged the shapes and then played around with the photo - but where is the fun in that?

Just keep in mind, that no matter what shapes you are using, it is important to not change the position of just one photo. They all need to be treated as a singe object even though they are in different layers and separated from each other by the template shapes. Once you get your layer "sandwich" made, you can adjust the size of the shapes, the size of the photos and the position of the photos. The shapes can be adjusted individually, but not the photos.