Shadowed Pixelation Photoshop Tutorial

The Mosaic filter doesn't have to be a boring effect. In this tutorial, we'll show you how to turn a normal pixel effect into a modern pixel effect that has shadows and depth to it.

Step 1

Begin by opening any photo into Photoshop. It's best if you have a high resolution photo to work with, but if any size will work, even a 500x500 pixel image.

Step 2

Before we begin, we need to resize it to the size we want the final results to be. Because this is a pixelation effect, you need to enlarge the image to compensate for the extra space each pixel takes up. If you don't set the dimensions large enough, you might not see enough details for someone to understand what the picture is. I recommend at 2000 pixels or more for the width and height.

Step 3

The first thing we're going to do for the layers is duplicate it. Press Ctrl+J or go to Layer> Duplicate Layer. Technically, you don't have to duplicate the layer to apply this effect, but we're doing it because it's good practice to keep a copy of the original layer as the "Background" layer. This way, when you want to use the original photo for anything, you have a copy as the background layer.

Step 4

As with any pixelation effect, you need to pixelate it. So that's what we're going to do. We'll use the Mosaic pixelation effect that you can find in the Filter> Pixelate> Mosaic menu. Once you have the Mosaic filter open, you can set the cell size. Set the size to 15 square and then click OK.