Step 8: Copy The Selection To A New Layer

With the side that's going to be mirrored now selected, go up to the Layer menu at the top of the screen, choose New, and then choose Layer via Copy. Or press the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac):

This creates a copy of the selection and places it on a new layer directly above the previous layer. Nothing will seem to have happened in the document window, but if we look in the Layers palette, we can see that we now have a new layer named "Layer 2", and if we look in the layer's preview thumbnail to the left of the layer's name, we can see that the layer contains a copy of the side of the document we had selected:

Step 9: Flip The Left Or Right Side Of The Document Horizontally

To create our mirrored image effect, all we need to do at this point is flip the half of the document that's on "Layer 2" horizontally. Before we do that, though, we need to tell Photoshop that we want to use the vertical center of the document (where the guide is) as the "flip point". To do that, press Ctrl+T (Win) / Command+T (Mac) to quickly bring up Photoshop's Free Transform command once again. You'll see the Free Transform box and handles appear around whichever side of the document you copied to "Layer 2". In my case, it's the left side. See that little target symbol in the center of the Free Transform box, the one I told you not to click on earlier:

That target symbol represents the rotation point for the Free Transform command. By default, it's located in the center of the Free Transform box, but we can move it anywhere we want. Wherever we move it to becomes the new rotation point. To tell Photoshop that we want to flip the image along the guide, simply click on the target symbol and drag it over to the side handle that's sitting directly in the middle of the document. Once you get close enough to the handle, the target symbol will snap to it:

With the Free Transform command still active, go up to the Edit menu at the top of the screen, choose Transform, and then choose Flip Horizontal:

Photoshop flips the contents of "Layer 2" for us, using our newly repositioned target symbol as the rotation point, and the right half of the document now becomes a perfectly mirrored copy of the left half (or vice versa):

Press Enter (Win) / Return (Mac) to accept the transformation and exit out of the Free Transform command. We don't need our guide anymore, so go up to the View menu and choose Clear Guides:

As I mentioned earlier, even if you forget to clear your guides when you're done working on the image, there's no need to worry because they won't print and they won't appear in the image if you save it for the web.

And with that, we're done! Here, after just a few simple steps, is our completed "mirror image" effect:

And there we have it!

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