Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. Today I'm going to show
you how to create a custom and quite sophisticated photo frame in
Photoshop.
This is the frame effect that we're going to create. I'm going to border my image
with a nice frame and add my name across the bottom.
It's a nice sophisticated way of displaying your photographs but there are a couple of
key elements in this frame that I'll show you as we go along.
Now I have a duplicate of this image, so let's just go and find that and let's start
working on it.
I'm just going to close the original down.
So this is the image without the frame, and the first thing that we're going to do is
to turn this background layer into a regular layer.
So I'm just going to double click on it and just click Ok.
And that floats that layer so that we can do things with it.
Now one of the really important things to add to this images is a very, very
thin black line around it. It's a key line.
We're going to do that by choosing Edit and then Stroke.
I'm going to make sure that black is selected as my color and all I want is a one pixel
line around the image.
But I want it on the inside and I'll just click Ok.
Now you mightn't be able to see this affect very clearly but you will on a lighter
image. And one of the nice things about this effect
is that it gives the image just a very, very slight border around it before
we even start adding the rest of our border to it.
Now we need to add some space around the image so I'm just going to zoom out here
so that I can see the image at a slightly smaller size. Now you can use
the canvas tool with image and then canvas size to add some canvas around the
image.
But I'm going to show you
a heaps easier way because you can eyeball it rather than having to work out
just exactly how many pixels you need to add.
We're going to use the crop tool because the crop tool can be used to crop
outwards as well as into an image so I'm just selecting the crop tool and I'm going to
select around the image.
Now I need to let go the crop tool before I start. I need to see these little handles.
Now I can crop outwards. So I'm just going to click on one of these handles and hold
the Alt or Option key and just drag outwards.
Holding Alt or Option
makes sure that the same amount of space is added to the left and right edges
of the image.
Now we're going to do it for the top and bottom
so I can eyeball exactly what I want the image to look like when I've added
the canvas to it.
Now you may remember from the final image that there was actually more canvas
space on the bottom of the image than there was at the top.
I've let go of the Alt or Option key at this stage and now I'm just dragging down to
add that extra canvas to the bottom.
And when I've got things looking the way I want them to do I'm just going to
double click, and that adds that extra canvas to the image.
But you'll see that it's much easier in most cases than using the
Image Canvas Size tool
because you can see how much canvas you need rather than having to calculate
exact numbers of pixels.
Now we need to add a new layer below this layer because we're going to fill it
with white for our
frame background.
So I'm going to click on the Add New Layer icon here but if I do it while holding the
Command or Control key
I can add it below so I don't have to move it later on.
So now we've added our new layer.
I have white as my background color selected here, so if I press Command and
Backspace or Control Backspace
I'm going to fill this layer with that background color.
So now we have our white frame. We're going to key line this as well. Now that's
important for when you're going to display this image on the web because
if you display this on a white background
the frame is going to disappear into the background.
But if you add a key line around the frame then it's going to look like a proper
frame.
So again we're going through exactly the same process to add a key line to the image, Edit
Stroke.
We're going to choose a one or two pixel black line
inside and just click Ok.
And that just adds a border.
While you can't see this key line very clearly here you are going to see it
when the image goes up on the web.
And now we're just going to add our text so I'm just going to click the text tool.
I'm using a nice simple font like Myriad Pro,
and let's just test and see how this font is going size wise.
I used capital letters here
because it just looks smarter.
And the top is looking just fine type wise but let's set it just a little bit
small. Let's set it to
say twenty two points
we've got some work to do with it.
What I've got here is that the tracking between my characters has been enlarged. I
like to use that
tracking feature to spread out the letters, so let's just bring in the character tab
because we're going to have to add some more tracking still.
And here's the tracking slider. I'm just using this as a scrubby slider so I'm just
dragging on the
letters AV and using them to dynamically spread the letters apart so that
I'm getting a good looking effect.
Once I've got what I want I'm just going to let go of the slider and that's all
in place.
So the final thing that I need to do is to make sure that this text is
nicely centered.
So I'm going to select this layer and then Control or Command, select the layer
underneath
choose Layer Align and I'm going to align the horizontal centers.
And what that does is make sure that this type layer is nicely centered
over this filled background layer so everything looks neat and tidy.
If I wanted to I could add an image description here. I'd just use a very small
font.
And for neatness sake I'd probably butt it up against the right-hand edge of
the photograph.
But there you have a very simple, very professional, very
clean looking
photo frame effect.
And if you wanted to you could create a totally reverse effect. You could add
white key lines around the image in the frame,
make the frame black and the text white and it will still give you a nice clean
framing effect.
I'm Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video learning session.
You can find more of my work at projectwoman.com.