Bridal Mosaic

For this picture, what I did here was I made a new document that 9" x 12" at 100 ppi with the backgrounds set to white. I then went to Photoshop<Preferences<Guides, Grid & Slices to make a grid on the page, with a gridline every 2.25 inches and the Subdivisions set to 1. After using View<Show<Grid to show the grid, I selected the single row marquee tool to select the first horizontal grid line at the top. I then kept selecting all the horizontal grid lines after. I then selected the single column marquee tool to select all the vertical grid lines then created a new layer, filled them with white, then deselected. After opening the bride's photo in Photoshop, I added a layer mask to the picture, chose the foreground to transparent gradient, and dragged up from the last line on the bottom to the next one. I then hid the grid lines and added a stroke layer style to the layer with the size at 3 pixels. After duplicating the original model layer and removing the color to the image, I added a Diffuse Glow filter to the image with the Graininess at 3, Glow Amount at 5, and the Clear at 16 in order to blow out the highlights and give a stylish grain to the whole image. The blending mode for the layer was changed to Soft Light with the Opacity at 75%. Next a subtle color effect was added using a Gold-Selenium 2 gradient adjustment layer. This adjustment layer's blending mode was also changed to Soft Light and the Opacity to 25%. Then, I first made the grid lines layer active and used the magic wand tool to select three boxes on the grid. With those boxes selected, I made a new layer for them and filled them with white.  After doing so, I repeated those same steps again for another three boxes but this time, after creating a new layer for those ones, I added in a Black & White adjustment layer. Finally, I put in some text while using the white squares as frames.