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How to Make a Photoshop Picture Frame 3

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Making a picture frame with Photoshop Part 3
© John Corney 2007

Part 1 and Part 2

As of now, your photo is covered with black fill. Let's move to the next steps which will result in the photo being revealed again with a black border around it.


At this stage the ants should still be marching around the edge of the black fill. Be sure not to deselect the selection. If you do by mistake, reselect the black fill by drawing around its outer edge with the rectangular marquee tool. We are now going to reduce the selection by a few pixels. Navigate as illustrated to Select > Modify > Contract:








Specify the number of pixels you wish to reduce the selection by. The same applies as mentioned at the start of the tutorial: depending on the resolution of the file you will specify more or less. Remember, "more is less", so if your image has a low resolution, then specify a lower number. If the resolution is high, specify a higher number of pixels. Also, it will depend on how wide a frame you want; I'm going for a relatively narrow frame so I'm specifying just 5 pixels.

When you click OK, the marquee border will contract all around by 5px, or by however many pixels you specified.

Now we are going to cut away the selection which will result in the outer 5 pixel border being left behind. Use the navigation shown below, or type ctrl+x.




Our photo is now framed as shown below. (Remember, the gray is just the background from my Photoshop workspace, not part of my image file at all.

This is good as far as it goes, but let's dress it up a bit to make the frame a little fancier and to give the impression of depth to the frame.

Right mouse click on the image and choose Blending Options.


Personally, I like to use Drop Shadow and Bevel and Emboss:



And finally, here's the finished product. Play around: make the canvas extension greater to create a bigger mat; create wider frames, play around with other blending options and colors. Go wild with creating frames for your photos with Photoshop.

Learn how to automate these steps using Photoshop Action Sets

Click the following link to see all three posts that make up this tutorial on creating frames with Photoshop.

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