Guest Post — Frames

I have asked Steve to explain how we got the frames on my pictures.

                                        I might add that I first saw similar framing at 

Picture Imperfect     Thanks Krista for getting me started on this idea.

Here is Steve's post.

A little while ago Mom asked me help her out with creating an action in Photoshop for a framing effect that she wanted to use for her blog posts... turns out a lot of you have really enjoyed this little effect and so she has asked me to "guest post" on her site and let you know how to create this simple yet pretty border look.  So here goes...

This was all done in Photoshop CS5, the steps should be the same for any other version of Photoshop as well, however I'm not sure if Photoshop Elements would allow for some of these or the creation of this as an action.  So to start with we'll go through the creation of the action.  First open up the image of your choice, then make 2 duplicate layers by hitting Cmd+J twice or go to Layer > Duplicate Layer and hitting OK twice from the menu.  Now make sure the top layer is selected and hit Cmd+T on Mac or go to Edit > Transform > Scale from the menu, at the top of the screen you will see several sizing boxes with the 3rd & 4th ones being set to 100.00%, click on the "Link" or "Lock Aspect Ratio" button between these two and enter 90% and hit enter.  You can set this value to any value you like but in our examples this is what we have chosen.  No go to the bottom of your layers palette and click on the fx button (second from the left) and choose drop shadow.  This will create a layer drop shadow behind the image, in our example we have used the following values, Distance 0, Spread 18, Size 73... keep in mind that we are doing this to full resolution images, if you decide to do this with smaller images these values will change accordingly.  Next select the next layer down which should be Layer 1 and add a Gaussian Blur... Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur... we have chosen a Radius of 40 pixels in our examples.  Then lastly we did a slight Levels adjustment to make the background slightly lighter then the main image by going to Levels, you can do this by hitting Cmd+L on Mac or going to Image > Adjustments > Levels and setting the mid point value which by default is set to 1.00 to 1.34.  Then save the image as a Jpeg ready for printing or web use.  

So this runs through how to create the action but there is one more little trick that is wonderful if you have 100 images you'd like to run this on.  Navigate to http://www.russellbrown.com/scripts.html , Dr. Brown has created an absolutely amazing little scrip that you can install in CS5 to make your life so easy.  Scroll down till you find CS5 Scripts and look for Image Processor Pro, it's a free script and it will allow you select 5, 12, 23 or how ever many images you like in Bridge and running this action on all of them at the same time.    I won't go into details of using this script or installing it as he has also created a very helpful video tutorial on it on his site.

I hope this answers all of your questions on this framing action... enjoy!

Steve Hiebert

www.expressblog.ca

www.expresslife.ca

www.personalexpressions.ca