What you’ll be creating:

I love mood boards. It’s a very cool way to display photos from your gallery and they’re really easy to make. In this short tutorial I will show you how to make a mood board with polaroid photos in Photoshop in just a few easy steps.

What you will learn in this Photoshop Tutorial:

• How to use a Photoshop mockup and how to customize it
• How to use Photoshop smart objects
• How to install Photoshop fonts and use them
• How to create a mood board that looks amazing

What You Will Need

To create this beautiful polaroid mood board we will use a few Photoshop assets that you can download for free:

• Free polaroid mockup by PhotoshopSupply
• Any font from this collection of signature fonts (in this tutorial I used Centhinydemo Font)
• Your own photos, or
• Stock photos from sites like Textures4Photoshop and Pixabay (eg: autumn leafs photo)

Start Creating the Polaroid Mood Board

To start creating the polaroid mood board you will need to download the polaroid mockup PSD file from PhotoshopSupply. Mockups are pre-made PSD files that contain everything you need for creating a professional looking end result.

Download the PSD file and when you open it in Photoshop it will look like this

Each element in the mockup is on a separate layer and grouped separately. So, you can select, move or modify the polaroid photos, coffee cup, flower pot, etc.

Let’s remove the elements that we don’t need from the mockup.

Select the move tool and switch to Group select mode.

Now let’s delete the layers that we don’t need for our mood board. Select by clicking and delete by using the DEL key. In this way you can delete the hand holding the coffee, the flower pot and the scotch tapes.

Now, change the color of the background. Locate the layer named Change Color. This is a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. Double click on the layer thumbnail to open up it’s settings, then adjust the Hue, Saturation and Lightness settings to match these:

Click to select one of the polaroid photos (layer group named PHOTO 1) and move it around where you need it.

Use CTRL+T (or Command+T on a Mac) to be able to scale and rotate the polaroid photo as needed. Also, make a few copies of the polaroid photo by using CTRL+J (or Command+J on a Mac).

For this mood board you only need 4 poplaroid photos.

Try to get the mood board to look something like this

How to Install New Fonts In Photoshop

The text on the polaroid photos in the mockup have a font that you probably don’t have installed in your Photoshop.

Not a problem, I will show you how to install a font in Photoshop.

For the mood board, check out the awesome list of free signature fonts on MockoFun. These fonts are really great if you need text that looks like handwriting. All the fonts are free and you have the font download link for each of the fonts.

For example, let’s use font number 9 in the list, Centhinydemo Font. Download the font from the indicated link and open the .otf or .ttf file from the package.

The operating system will offer to install the font for you. Click the Install button and you are done.

The Centhinydemo font is installed in Photoshop (actually it’s available for all software on your computer).

With the Text tool add this text to the left of the polaroid photos:

“Today’s momments are tomorrow’s memories”

Switch the font used to Centhinydemo with the size of 235pt.

Also, select and change the text on the 4 polaroid photos to Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter switching the font to Centhinydemo with the size of 80pt.

How to Work With Smart Objects in Photoshop

For finishing the mood board you need to add your photos.

The polaroid mockup has blank placeholders for adding photos (the layers called ADD PHOTO). These are Photoshop Smart Objects.

What are Photoshop Smart Objects?

Smart Objects are a special kind of layers in Photoshop, a kind of placeholder layers that allow you to easily mange editable content.

Let’s see an example in our case. Double click on the layer thumbnail for one of the Smart Objects called ADD PHOTO. You will get a new document opening up. This is the content of the Smart Object and everything that you put in here will immediately be updated in the parent document when saving.

Either grab one of the the stock photos I mentioned in the beginning, or one of your own photos. Drag and drop it in the opened Smart Object then hit CTRL+S (or Command+S on a Mac) to save the Smart Object. Close the Smart Object document to return to the parent document.

What happened?

The photo that you added appears in multiple polaroid frames in the document.

But why?

This is how Smart Objects work. When you creat a copy of a Smart Object layer, all copies are linked to each other and whatever you edit in one Smart Object affects all copies.

This is great and useful in many situations, but not in this one, because you want to add a different photo in each polaroid frame.

So, how do you break the link between copies of Smart Objects?

The solution is that when copying a Smart Object instead of using duplicate layer (CTRL+T or Command+T on a Mac) you should Right Click on the Smart Object layer and use New Smart Object via Copy (be careful to Right Click on the layer name not on the layer thumbnail to get the right menu).

Do this for the duplicate Smart Objects and delete the ones you don’t need. Be careful to Right Click on the copy created and choose Create Clipping Mask because that’s how the polaroid mockup was setup initially.

Double click on the Smart Object thumbnail, place your new image in there then save.

If everything went well, then you should get this end result — a beautiful polaroid mood board.

Good Job!

You now know how to open a use a Photoshop mockup PSD file, how to install a font in Photoshop and even how to use Photoshop smart objects to create amazing designs of polaroid photo mood boards. For most of my design, I like to give them more of a vintage look. It's just my style. To add the old/vintage look simply add as an overlay or background any of these awesome free old paper background images.

What if you don’t have Photoshop?

If you don’t have or don’t want to use Photoshop, here’s how to make a mood board online:

1. Go to MockoFun and register for a free account
2. Open up this high quality polaroid mockup from the templates section
3. Make the changes you want just like you did in Photoshop in the steps above. MockoFun allows you to easy swap the photos with your own, change the colors and add text with over 800 fonts to choose from.
4. Download the online mood board to JPG, PNG or even a printable PDF version.
5. Done!