Step 4: Select The Rectangle Marquee Tool

Select Photoshop's Rectangular Marquee Tool from the top of the Tools panel, or press the letter M on your keyboard to quickly select it with the shortcut:

With the Rectangular Marquee Tool selected, the Options Bar at the top of the screen changes to show options for the Rectangular Marquee Tool. One of the options is Style. Change it from its default setting of Normal to Fixed Ratio, then enter 4 for the Width and 6 for the Height. This will force the shape of the selection we're about to draw into a 4x6 aspect ratio, which will make it easy for us to add some 4x6 photos to the document later:

Step 5: Draw A Rectangular Selection On The Left Side Of The Document

Drag out a rectangular selection on the left side of the document. This is where the photo on the left will appear. You'll notice that as you drag out the selection, the shape of it is constrained to the 4x6 aspect ratio we set in the Options Bar in the previous step. If you need to reposition the selection as you're dragging it out, simply hold down your spacebar, drag your mouse to move the selection into place, then release your spacebar and continue dragging. Make sure to leave enough room to fit two more photos inside the document:

Step 6: Fill The Selection With Gray

Once you've drawn the selection, go back up to the Edit menu and choose the Fill command again:

This time, when the Fill dialog box appears, change the Use option in the Contents section at the top of the dialog box to 50% Gray:

Click OK when you're done to exit out of the dialog box. Photoshop fills the selection with gray. There's no special reason why we've chosen gray here. We simply needed to fill the selection with color, and since we're using it only as a placeholder for an image, gray seemed like a natural choice. Press Ctrl+D (Win) / Command+D (Mac) to remove the selection outline from around the shape:

Step 7: Add A Thin White Stroke Around The Shape

Let's add a thin white border around the shape. Click on the Layer Styles icon at the bottom of the Layers panel and select Stroke from the bottom of the list of layer styles that appears:

This brings up Photoshop's Layer Style dialog box set to the Stroke options in the middle column. First, change the color of the stroke by clicking on the small color swatch to the right of the word Color and choosing white from the Color Picker when it appears. Click OK to close out of the Color Picker when you're done. Increase the Size of the stroke to around 10 px (pixels), then change the Position to Inside:

Once you've set the color, size and position of the stroke, click OK to exit to exit out of the dialog box. Here's my image with the thin white border now applied to the shape:

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