Adding cool frame borders to your photos
Creating cool borders
To add great borders to your photos:
Step One: We’re going to start in Photoshop with prepping our edge file for use in Photoshop Lightroom. I downloaded the edge border you see here from iStockphoto.com (it cost me $4 for the high-res 300 dpi download, but you can download it free from this book’s website).
The edge comes flattened on the background (see Figure 1), so to start, click the Magic Wand tool (W) within the black area in the center to select that area. Press-and-hold the Shift key and click on some of the outside edge areas to add those to our selection. Lastly, go under the Select menu and choose Similar to pick up any stray areas we missed. Then press Command-Shift-J (PC: Ctrl-Shift-J) to put this edge up on its own separate layer (as shown in the next step).
Figure 1: The edge is flattened on the background layer.
Step Two: We need a hole cut out of this solid black edge graphic in the shape of a rectangle (so our photo can show through). So, get the Rectangular Marquee tool (M) and click-and-drag a rectangular selection that’s almost as big as our edge graphic (as shown in Figure 2), then press the Delete (PC: Backspace) key to knock a large rectangular hole out of our graphic.
Figure 2: Drag a marquee selection almost as big as the edge graphic.
Step Three: For this to work properly, our file can’t have a solid white background or it will cover our photo when we bring it into Lightroom—instead the background has to be transparent. To do that, go to the Layers palette and drag the Background layer into the Trash (at the bottom of the palette) to delete it (prior to CS3, you had to unlock the Background layer first).
That leaves us with just our edge border on a transparent layer (see Figure 3). Now we can save it, so go under the File menu and choose Save As. When the dialog appears, you’ll need to choose a file format that supports transparency (JPEG doesn’t), so choose PNG as your format, give the file a name, and click Save (you’ll probably get a notice that because this is a layered file, you’ll have to save a copy of the file instead—no problem—just click Save).
Figure 3: The edge border is on a transparent layer.
Step Four: All right, that’s all the prep work in Photoshop—now back to Lightroom. Click on the photo you want to have an edge frame, then jump over to the Print module. In the Print module, in the Overlays panel, turn on the Identity Plate checkbox. Then, in the Identity Plate pop-up menu, choose Edit to bring up the Identity Plate Editor you see here (see Figure 4). In that dialog, click on the Use a Graphical Identity Plate radio button (because we’re going to import a graphic, rather than using text), then click on the Locate File button (as shown here), locate your saved PNG edge file, and click Choose (PC: Open) to load it into your Identity Plate Editor (you can see the top of our edge frame in the small preview window shown here).
Figure 4: The Identity Plate Editor.
Step Five: When you click OK, our edge frame will appear hovering over your print (almost like it’s on its own layer—see Figure 5). The size and position won’t be right, so that’s the first thing you’ll want to fix (which we’ll do in the next step, but while we’re here, notice how the center of our edge is transparent—you can see right through it to the photo below it. That’s why we had to save this file without the background layer, and as a PNG—to keep that transparency intact).
Figure 5: The edge frame is hovering over the print.
Step Six: To resize your border, you can either click-and-drag a corner point outward (as shown in Figure 6), or use the Scale slider in the Overlays panel. Once the size looks about right, you can reposition the edge by simply clicking-and-dragging inside the edge frame borders.
Figure 6: Resize the frame to fit the picture.
Step Seven: When it’s right where you want it, just click your cursor outside the border and it will deselect. The final photo with the edge frame border is shown here (see Figure 7). Now, if you decide you want to keep this border and use it in the future—go back to the Identity Plate Editor and from the Custom pop-up menu at the bottom-left corner of the dialog, choose Save As to save this frame border as an Identity Plate you can use anytime to add a quick border effect.
Figure 7: The final photo with the edge frame border.
Step Eight: We created a vertical frame, but how do you add this frame edge to a horizontal photo, like the one shown in Figure 8 (shot by my good friend Bill Fortney, when we were down shooting in Arizona’s Antelope Canyon slots)? If you change your page setup to Landscape, the Identity Plate will rotate automatically. If you are printing horizontally in a Portrait setup, you can rotate the Identity Plate by clicking on the circular Rotate button that appears to the right of the Identity Plate checkbox in the Overlays panel (it’s shown circled in red in Figure 8). You’ll probably have to resize and reposition the frame (as I did here) to make it fit just right, but now your single frame edge is doing double duty.
Figure 8: Rotate your frame using the Rotate button in the Identity Plate Editor.
Where to go from here
For more information about Photoshop, Photoshop Lightroom, and photo editing techniques, check out the following articles:
- Photoshop Design Center
- Photoshop Lightroom Design Center
- Adobe Creative Suite 3 Video Workshop
- Printing photos, by the experts at Adobe
