What I did here was I first had to set 4 guidelines 1/2 inch from the edge of the picture. afte doing so, the marquee tool helped me to set the transparent rectangle on it. I then reset the guidelines to a 2"x 2" size and cut the pictures into perfect squares. After aligning them to the top guideline and making the spaces between them equal, I put those four pictures into another file and gave them a hue/saturation and a brightness/contrast adjustment layer. Then I made the words "tranquility", "park", and "2011" bold outlines and used the eyedropper tool to sample color from the telescope and filled the letters and numbers in with the same color. The very last things to do after all that was to give the pictures a drop shadow, which i copied and pasted onto the Text layers. Then at last, I gave the transparent rectangle a black outline, which was about 4 pixels.
