Artist creates ad using 1,000 Photoshop layers

  • Published on May 5, 2014
Artist creates ad using 1,000 Photoshop layers

Most Adobe Photoshop users have often wished for more time to complete a project. One artist took more than 300 hours and used more than 1,000 Photoshop layers to create an impressive composite from many individual images as part of a campaign designed for Adobe Systems.

Adobe ad uses 1,000 layers to create colorful image
The final images encompasses a colorful view of Times Square in New York City, complete with skyscrapers, shops and people, shot by the photographer across multiple locations, and composited together.

According to Composite Planet, a digital imaging site run by Josh Rossi, the artist behind this project, he took thousands of pictures and combined them all using more than 1,000 Photoshop layers. He began with the background, using images of skyscrapers and buildings as the basis for the image. From there, he started to add in additional elements, such as the sky, the ground and the sidewalk. The people came last as he continued to sprinkle the picture with vibrant colors and shapes. 

"The perspective was tricky and needed a high angle looking down," he explains on his site. "It was inefficient to bring a ladder around New York City and shoot the 50+ elements so Josh decided to put the camera on a tripod and hold it in the air with a 10 second timer. He needed a high shutter speed as well as a small f-stop to get a deep depth of field to achieve the effect he wanted."

The source also noted that lighting was one of the largest issues Rossi faced when both taking and editing the image, but since Photoshop houses a number of features ideal for perfecting an image's color, Rossi was able to fix the images to get the final product he desired.

Understanding the complexities of Photoshop
Rossi's image illustrates what you can create when you have a solid knowledge of Adobe Photoshop. American Graphics Institute also helps artists to unlock the power of Photoshop through Photoshop training courses, ideal for artists of any expertise level.

About the author

 is a user experience designer, Photoshop expert, educator and author based in Boston. She is the author of more than 20 books on design tools and processes, including Adobe Creative Cloud for Dummies, Adobe Creative Cloud Digital Classroom, and Photoshop Digital Classroom. She has been awarded a Microsoft MVP three times for her work with user experience design in creating apps for touch, desktop, and mobile devices.

Jennifer delivers UX training and UX consulting for large Fortune 100 companies, small start-ups, and independent software vendors. She has been hired by Adobe and Microsoft to deliver training workshops to their staff, and has traveled to Asia, Europe, India, the Middle East, and across the U.S. to deliver courses and assist on UX design projects. She has extensive knowledge of modern Windows UX Design, having worked closely with the Windows team to create educational material and deliver UX workshops to key partners globally on behalf of Microsoft. Jennifer works with a wide range of prototyping tools including Fireworks, Photoshop, Illustrator, Blend for Visual Studio, XD, and Balsamiq. She also works extensively in the fields of presentation design and visual design.