Photoshop Tutorial - Add A Photo Frame, Border, Edge

In today's tutorial, I'm going to show you how to make a nice photo frame.

Open your image, and make sure that the layers palette is open. Right-click on your background, duplicate the layer, call this layer "Frame".  Now right-click on your background once again, duplicate the layer, call the next one "Picture".

O.K. Now we are going to increase our canvas size so we have some room to work with. Click "Image", "Canvas Size", and for a picture of this size, with these dimensions, I'm going to increase each dimension by 100.

Now we want to go click on the background, use the little drop-down on the layers palette, click new layer, call this one "Colour". And the colour I am going to choose in this case, is my foreground colour, white. And I choose my "Paint Bucket Tool", click, and we have our chosen background colour.

Now, click on the "Frame" layer, and then Ctrl-click on the frame layer, and we'll have a selection that surrounds just the photo portion. And we want to click on "Layer", "Layer Mask", and "Reveal Selection".

O.K. Now you'll see layer mask appears to the right on the frame layer, but we don't want this central area to be all filled with white. White is the area that is actually going to be revealed. We want a thin border, so, once again we are going to Ctrl-click on the layer to get that same selection we had earlier, and we're going to go: "Select", "Modify", "Contract". I'm going to contract this selection by 35.

O.K. I'm going to make sure that the mask portion of the layer is selected by clicking on it, and then I am going to make sure that black is my background colour, and I'm going to cut: "Edit", "Cut".

Now you'll see that the layer mask has a thin bordered selection in the white, and we can see the effect of this by turning off the layer below, the visibility of it, and we can see the beginnings of our frame.

Now, let's add, let's click on the photo portion of the frame and go to "Filter"; we're going to go down to "Texture", and we'll choose the, uh, "Craquelure", I don't know if that's how to pronounce it properly, but that's how it comes out from my mouth. And we're going to click "O.K."; we'll have a beginnings.

Now we also want to go in: "Filter", "Distort", "Displace"; you can choose different values here but these are fine for now, and I'm going to click "O.K.". And there's a variety of textures in the, uh, you know, "Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS3\Presets\Textures" folder. O.K. And I'm going to choose the "Rust Flakes", and click "Open". And you'll see this nice organic look that we get around here.

Now, to this layer we're going to add an effect, so we'll click on "FX" down here, the "Drop Shadow" effect, O.K., and you can, you know, darken it up a little, sort of tweak the values to your liking, click "O.K."

Now one thing you'll notice is that our picture in the background is actually overlapping this nice rough edge. We don't want that. So we're going to click on ... make sure that layer is visible ... and click on that layer, go to our "Rectangular Selection Tool", and just sort of in between this line here, sort of in the centre of our nice organically displaced photo frame, we are going to make a selection, and then we're going to invert that selection, so: "Select", "Inverse". So now we are actually selecting everything outside of the original box that we drew. And then we are going to cut that, and you'll see that that overlapping disappears and we are left with the frame.

Now the frame is cool as it is, is blends in nicely with the photo but still stands out. But there's other things that we can do with this. One is: click "Image", "Adjustments", "Hue and Saturation", and just by playing ... ooops ... I'm on the wrong layer, make sure you've selected your frame layer; "Image", "Adjustments", "Hue and Saturation", and, just by pulling this to one side or the other, we create quite a nice effect. I like that. Click "O.K.".

And something else you can do, if you would like to have this as a solid colour or something closer to a solid colour: under "FX", choose "Colour Overlay". Here it comes up with its sort of default brilliant red. And now when I said portion of a colour, here we go, we could, we could lighten that up and just kind of give it more of a hue of red overall while still maintaining some of the variations within it; or you can simply pick ... you know ... anything that's solid, any solid colour that strikes your fancy. I'm going to go with the original red, and just bring it down, to about 30% there, close to. Click "O.K."

And there you have it! A nice photo frame for your image.