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We have spent a lot of time dealing with text,
so this week I'm going to go into generating stylish looking
frames for Photos. Photoshop 6.0 has made this task extremely
easy (compared to earlier releases), and for those of you who
are savvy in the ways of automation, many of these effects can
be saved as a layer style, action, or droplet for multiple image
processing. In fact, existing actions that create fancy text can
often be applied to frames as well. If the action works on a
selection, then you can simply use the area where your frame
will be as the selection rather than the text. I'll walk thru
that shortly, but first lets take a look at framing photos with
Photoshop 6 from scratch.
We will start with a photo of my favorite
tormentors. They are so cute... they take after their mom, trust
me! Anyway, cute though they are I want to dress this up before
I send it to grandma's email. She get's a kick out of grandkid
pictures... go figure!
I'm going to duplicate the image in a new layer
before I begin. Hit Control/Command>A to select the entire
image. I'm then going to Select>Modify>Border, and create a
border 16 pixels wide. That didn't quite give me as thick an
edge as I'd like, so I'll just repeat the process, modifying the
border by another 16 pixels.
Now with the selection still active, I'm making
a new layer. I can fill this with basically anything I wish... a
color, gradient, texture, etc. You know how I love metal
effects, so let's get a little crazy and shoot for Solid Gold!
Let's fill the frame with a brown color such
as...ok, brown. As the border uses a feathered edge that allows
you to see parts of the image under the filled area, I'm going
to repeat the fill a couple times. I also want to take away the
feather somewhat, and I can do that by adding a bevel to the
frame:
... and adjusting the contour:
...for these results:
Not too bad for a couple minutes work. Ok, let's
delete all that, and go back to our original image. Make a new
layer above the photo, reselect, and fill with a color twice...
any will do, as we will be trying out the layer styles for this
example. Now open up your Layer Styles Palette and hit a Style.
With one click, here is the result using a Layer Style supplied
by Adobe:
... and the result of applying one of my own:
Very fast, and very cool! Grandma would be so
proud!
Applying a text effects action to photo frames
works on a premise similar to our approach to paths last week.
All we need is a selection for many of the actions I create, as
I used the type mask tool almost exclusively. So, if you have an
action requiring the type mask tool to be utilized, the process
of applying this action to a frame is simple! If the action
opens a new image, when you come to the stop asking for the type
mask to be entered, close the action generated image and make
your frame selection active on your Photo. Press the action's
play button again and the effects will be applied to the frame.
In this example I'm using an action called Marble Trinket, which
I'm sending with this article. Here is the result of the action
running on text:
...and the result when applied to my frame:
I hope you have fun with this article, and that
soon there will be marbled photos all over the web. Until next
week, stay warm! Time to find the long underwear... |