Saturday, February 7, 2015

Learn how to create a simple winter frame for your photos in Photoshop (1)

Hi, everyone. In this tutorial I'll show you how to create a simple winter photo-frame for your photos.

Open your photo in Adobe Photoshop (I use Photoshop CS6, but earlier versions of Photoshop CS are fine as well).

Now, first step: you need some extra space around your photo, so you have to increase the Canvas size. Press CTRL ALT C (C from canvas) to open the Canvas Size dialog box. If you don't want to use shortcuts then go to Menu and choose Edit > Keyboard shortcuts > Application Menus > Canvas size. Don't modify anchor placement (by default, Photoshop centers the image and adds or removes the canvas around it, and that's exactly what we need for this tutorial).

In the Width and Height boxes you can see the width and the height of your photo, which, for the moment, are identical with the width and the height of your canvas. Increase both the width and the weight of your canvas with 50-100px, so you'll have enough space to play with the frame. Don't worry if it's too much space around your photo, we'll remove (some of) it later.

Using the Canvas Size dialog box you can also set a canvas colour. The following options are available: Foreground colour, Background colour, White, Black, Gray, or Other. If you select Other, Photoshop will open the Color Picker dialog box, where you can select any colour you need. In this tutorial we won't use this option, but it's better to know about it.



Step two: Create a new layer beneath the layer that contains your photo. The easiest way to do this is to open the Layer panel (press F7 if you don't see this panel on your workspace; if you still can't see the Layer panel that means the panel was opened but was collapsed, and that's way you wasn't able to see it; by pressing F7 you've just closed it. Press again F7 to open it again) and to click the New Layer button while holding the CTRL key down.

This combination (CTRL + New Layer) will create a new layer beneath the current layer. If you click the New Layer button without holding down the CTRL key, the new layer will be positioned above the current layer (the layer containing your photo). In this case you have to select the new layer and to move it beneath the layer that contains the photo. You can move it by pressing the CTRL and the left square bracket key ("[").



Fill the new layer with White colour: in the layer panel click on the new layer icon to select it, select the White colour as the Foreground colour, press the G key to activate the Paint Bucket Tool (or select it from the toolbar), and click anywhere inside the layer to fill it with the Foreground colour (White). Alternatively, you can select a layer and press Alt + the Backspace key to fill the layer whit the foreground colour (in our case, White colour).



Create a new layer and bring it on top of all other layers. From the toolbox select the Rectangle tool and select the Path drawing mode (see the image below). Draw a path around your photo; try to stay as close as possible to the photo's edges, but don't worry if the path does not match exactly to your photo. If you are addicted to precision, you can specify the dimensions of the shape to correspond with the width and weight of your photo and after that you can center the shape on the canvas to match exactly the photo's edges.



Open the Paths panel by choosing Window > Paths from the main menu. Double click on the path to give it a name and to save it:



Read the part two of this tutorial here:

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