Step 6: Open Photoshop's "Texturizer" Filter Dialog Box

As I mentioned at the beginning of this tutorial, most of the work of actually creating the puzzle pieces is already done for us thanks to one of the textures that are installed for free with Photoshop. Unfortunately, even though the texture is sitting on your hard drive ready for use, it's not actually loaded into Photoshop, at least not automatically. We'll need to load it in ourselves, but before we can do that, we'll need to bring up Photoshop's Texturizer filter, so go up to the Filter menu at the top of the screen, choose Texture, and then choose Texturizer:

Step 7: Load The "Puzzle" Texture

This brings up the large Texturizer filter dialog box, with a preview window on the left and the options for the filter on the right. We need to load in the "Puzzle" texture that Photoshop has installed on your hard drive, so click on the small arrow to the right of the Texture selection option on the right of the dialog box, which brings up a menu with only one option, Load Texture. Click on it to select it:

This opens the Load Texture dialog box, allowing us to navigate to our texture. The "Puzzle" texture we're looking for is located inside the Photoshop directory on your hard drive, wherever you happened to install Photoshop. On a PC (Windows), the default install location is on your C: drive, so first navigate to your C: drive, then open your Program Files folder. Inside the Program Files folder, you'll find an Adobe folder, and inside the Adobe folder, you'll find your Photoshop folder. The actual name of the Photoshop folder will depend on which version of Photoshop you're using. So, for example, if you're using Photoshop CS3 as I am here and you installed Photoshop to the default location, your Photoshop folder will be at C:\Program files\Adobe\Photoshop CS3.

On a Mac, things are a bit easier. You'll find your Photoshop folder inside your Applications directory on your hard drive. Again, the actual name of your Photoshop folder will depend on which version of Photoshop you're using.

Once you've located your Photoshop folder, double-click on it to open it. Inside the folder, you'll find a Presets folder. Double-click on it to open it, and now look for a Textures folder. Double-click on it to open it, and you'll see all of the textures that Photoshop installed for us. There's quite a few of them to choose from, but the one we want for our puzzle effect is the Puzzle texture. Click on it to select it, then click on the Load button to load the texture:

Step 8: Adjust The Texture Options

With the Puzzle texture loaded, you should see that the Texture option in the Texturizer dialog box is now set to Puzzle. If, for some reason it isn't, select the Puzzle texture from the list. Then, using the preview window on the left of the dialog box as your guide, adjust the options for the texture. The settings you use will depend largely on your image and how big you want your puzzle pieces to appear. In my case, I want the puzzle pieces to appear as large as possible, so I'm going to raise my Scaling option all the way to 200%. The Relief option below it determines how strong of an appearance the puzzle pieces will have in the image. I'm going to set mine to 6. Again, the settings you use may be different. Finally, set the Light option, which determines the light source for the puzzle pieces, to Top Right:

Click OK when you're done to exit out of the Texturizer dialog box and apply the texture to your image. Here's my photo with the puzzle texture applied:

The basic puzzle effect is now complete, but let's take things a bit further and remove some of the pieces, as if the puzzle is still a work in progress. We'll do that next!