The Adjacent panels is good replacement for the standard rectangular or circular frames you use for images or pictures. This is the technique I used to create the picture slots that appear on the splash page of this site.

The tutorial makes use of the cornering technique which creates the smooth rounded corners of panels.


Start by creating a wide rectanglular panel. The wider the panel you create the more panels you can make out of the starting panel. Once you have the rectangle, you will first need to shape the left and right side of the panels. We will be using selections created by the marquee tool to cut the sides of the panel and shape it.

Create an elliptical selection and position the left side of the selection on the left side of the rectangular panel (fig 01a).

After you have the selection in place , hold the shift key and use the rectangular marquee tool or lasso tool to select the remaining parts of the rectangle (fig 01b).



Apply step one on the right side to shape that side of the panel (fig 02a). Try to make the shape of the two sides different by using different cuts.

We then need to make a cut across the panel to create two panels out of the single panel we started with.

Make another elliptical selection with one side of the selection going across the panel (fig 02b). Create a new layer then apply EDIT > STROKE and use 4 pixels for thickness and use a center stroke.


Go to the pattern layer then We will use the lines we created on step 2 to make a cut across the single panel and make it into 2 panels.

To do this, load a selection on the line (fig 03a). With the selection still loaded, go back to the panel layer and hit the delete key to make a cut across the original panel and make 2 adjacent panels. You can remove the line layer after this step because we wont need it anymore.

Select one of the panel using the wand tool (fig 03b) and, cut and paste it into a new layer so that each new panel is now on its separate layer.


The cornering technique will be the last step for the tutorial. It will remove all the sharp corners of the panels and make them smooth and rounded. The blue circles shown on the left image indicate the size and position of the elliptical selections that I used for the cornering technique.



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