Here are three quick tutorials that will help you put these useless photos to use.

Useless Photograph

Here is an example of a useless photo. Let’s go ahead and put it to use.

Use the Photo as a Color Scheme

Apply this to the image: Filter > Pixelate > Mosaic

Depending on how many colors you want, you can mess around with the settings. The bigger the cell size, the less colors. The smaller the cell size, you get more colors.

Pixels

Here is a sample business card that I made using these color schemes.

Business Card

Turn the Photo Into a Cool Stripe Background

Apply this to the image: Filter > Stylize > Glowing Edges (Use the default settings.)

Glowing

Now, use another filter. Filter > Blur > Motion Blur (Angle: 0; Distance: 999px)

Stripe

Let’s make the lines a little clearer. Filter > Sharpen > Sharpen (Do this a few times until you get some clean lines, but don’t do it too much or you will start to see some weird colors pop-out.)

Sharp Lines

Now, you can use this as a pattern, background for a website, etc. The use for these lines are endless. You can see that I used this pattern as the background of the post image.

Create a Stylized, Black & White Pattern

Go to Image > Adjustment > Levels

Drag the left and right sliders towards the middle until the photo gets a nice contrast.

Contrast

Apply this to the image: Filter > Artistic > Cutout (Levels: 8; Simplicity: 0; Fidelity:3)

Cutout

Go to Image > Adjustment > Threshold (Drag the sliders until you get enough details on the image.)

Details

Shrink this photo, then press CTRL+A or CMD+A, then go to Edit > Define Pattern

Name your pattern. Now, create a new layer, and fill it with the pattern. Here is the final piece that I came up with. You can do this and use it for a post image, as a Desktop or Twitter wallpaper.

Cool

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