Friday, August 2nd, 2013

Photoshop – Create an Oval Frame Effect

Learn how to create an oval frame effect in Photoshop. This video includes how to use a clipping mask, sample a color from an image, make a leaf brush, paint multi-color leaves on an image, add a stroke border to the oval frame and even change its color. This is a jam packed tutorial suitable for a competent beginner or intermediate level Photoshop user.

Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can make an oval framed photo effect in Photoshop. Before we get started doing this effect let’s have a look and see what it is that we’re aiming for.

What I’m going to do is take this image here and frame it inside an oval frame. And we’re going to add a little border stroke around the frame and then add these decorative elements. The colors for each of these elements is going to be sampled from the image and this is just a single brush that paints in different colors. So if you’re ready let’s get started with this tutorial. So if you’re ready let’s get started with this tutorial.

I’m going to begin here with a new image so I’ll click File, New and I’m just going to do an 11 by 8-1/2 letter size image. But you can make yours whatever size that you like. And here’s my image.

I’m going to center the oval so I’m going to start with a couple of guides. I want a 50 percent guide horizontal and a 50 percent vertical. It’s just a little bit easier to do this with guides. Then I’m going to target my marquee tool. I want the elliptical marquee tool. It shares a toolbar position with the rectangular marquee. But it’s the elliptical marquee that you want. I’m going to hold my mouse pointer over the intersection of these two gridlines and then hold Alt down as I drag out to create my oval. This creates an oval that’s centered over those lines. Of course if I add a Shift key at this point I’ll have everything constrained to a perfect circle centered on this document. But I want an oval so I’m going to let go of the Shift key but make sure that I keep the Alt key held down until I’ve finish drawing my shape. I’ll let go the left mouse button and then let go of the Alt key. This is my shape.

I’ll need a new layer so I’ll click the New Layer icon here and I’m going to fill this with black. So I’m just going to set black as my foreground color and Alt Backspace, Option Delete on the Mac. You can fill it with any color at all but I’m just using black. Now I can get rid of my guide so I’m going to click View and I’m going to clear my guides. I’m going to bring in my image here so I’m just going to drag on the background layer and just add it to this image. Now I want it centered so I’m going to press the Shift key as I center it over this image. I can now close this because I don’t need it any longer. I have my oval still selected. You can probably just see the marching ants there. Now that’s going to get in the way when I start to resize and move this image so I’m going to press Ctrl or Command D to deselect the marching ants. Now I’m going to target my move tool, Ctrl T, Ctrl 0 so I can see my handles. I’m just going to drag everything into position. I’m going to use the Shift key with that corner handle because that will drag everything in proportion. I’m now going to create a clipping mask.

So with this layer selected, Layer, Create Clipping Mask. Now I need to select that checkmark before I can do that so let’s create the clipping mask. And now let’s just fine- tune this image. And I think that’s a pretty good position for it. Now I want to focus on the background layer because I want to sample one of the colors from this image for the background layer. Now the image that we saw had a background which was sampled from the image. So I’m going to target the eyedropper tool here and I’m just going to target this little girl’s dress to get a color from her dress. And when I do you can see that the color is in the top of the ring here. That’s the one I’m going to select. And I have a 3 by 3 average so I’m averaging out the colors under the cursor. So I could go for a slightly lighter blue if I wanted. Let’s select that. And now with the background layer selected I’m going to Alt Backspace, Option Delete to add that color. Now let’s go and add a border around this oval. And to do that I’m going to need to reselect the oval. So I’m going to target the oval shape here, click on the magic wand tool here, it shares a toolbar position with the quick selection tool, but we want the magic wand. We want to make sure that Contiguous is selected. And now I’m just going to click here on this underlying shape which is this black shape here and that gives me this selection.

I’m going to add a new layer so I’m just going to make sure that my new layer goes in at the top and it’s not part of this clipping group. If it were I would have to right click it and choose Release Clipping Mask but it’s now not part of that group. You could see that the marching ants are in position so what we need to do now is to select the color to use. So again I’m going to use the eyedropper and I’m going to select a greeny color from the grass in the background here. So we’ll select that, Edit, Stroke. And you’ll need to experiment a bit with the stroke to see what works best with your image. But I found that a 20 pixel stroke on this particular image is pretty good so I’m just going to settle for a 20 pixel stroke. And I’m doing it over the center and I’ll click Ok. And there’s my stroke. To deselect the marching ants Ctrl or Command D. Now we’re in a position to brush on some leaves around the edge of this image. But to do so we’re going to need to create a brush first up. So let’s go and create a brush. If you’ve already created a brush or you have a brush that you want to use you can skip this step but I’m just going to show you quickly how I created my brush.

I’ll choose File, New and just click Ok. I just need any old document here. I’m going to select the custom shape tool here. It shares a toolbar position with the rectangle tool and these other tools. But it’s custom shape that I want. From the options here on the toolbar I want to select Pixels and I’m going to select black and white as my colors. In earlier versions of Photoshop you’ll still have these three options but they’re going to be side by side here. You just want to make sure that you select the fill pixels or the pixels option. Here I’m going to select a shape which is a leaf shape.

Now last time I selected this shape so let’s make a different shape this time. I’m going to select this one here and then I’m going to drag to draw it on the image. And I’m going to hold the Shift key down as I did so it’s constrained to a nice proportion. Now all I need do is to select Edit and then Define Brush Preset. And I’m going to call this leaf and click Ok. And that is now that shape is now saved as a brush so I can just discard this image. I don’t need it any longer. Now I can go and select my brush. So I’m going to target the brush tool and from the brush dropdown list here I’m going to select my brush. And my brush is always going to be the very, very last one in this brushes palette if I’ve just created it. So this is my brush.

I’m just going to click to select it and then just click outside here to hide that window. Now you can see that the brush is huge and way, way too big right now. So I’m just going to press the square bracket key, the opening square bracket key, to just size it down to size. Now if I start painting I’m first of all going to add a new layer and I’m going to just sample a color from this image. So let’s sample this orange color and let’s just see what happens if I start to paint. Well it’s not looking anything like what it is that we want it to look like. So I’m just going to Ctrl Z to get out of there and let’s go and set up our brush so it paints a little bit more intelligently. I’m going to click here to open the brush panel.

Now in the brush panel here the first thing I want to do is go to brush tip shape, tap on it and I’m going to increase the spacing because I want this brush to be spaced out quite a bit. I could change the size at this point if I wanted to but I’ve already measured this and it’s a pretty good size so I’m going to leave that. I’m going to enable Shape Dynamics and click on Shape Dynamics. Now I want the size to vary a little bit so I’m going to adjust the size jitter. That will make it size in different size brushes as I paint. And I’m also going to adjust the angle jitter. Now I can adjust it to quite a high value here because I don’t mind if these leaves point in completely the opposite direction. In fact that’s going to look pretty good for my leaves. And then I’m going to tap Scattering to enable that and to go to get the Scattering controls. I’ve got Scattering enabled here on both axes and I can just pull it out or push it in to see what I’ve got. I think I want a little bit better control than adjusting count because this is going to give me way too many leaves so I think I’d rather paint more and have less of a count. So I think that’s going to be pretty good.

The last thing I need to do is to enable Color Dynamics. What I want with Color Dynamics is I’d really like this brush to do all the work for me and I want it to paint in color. So I’ve got orange as my background color. Now I’m going to tap here and I’m going to select a color from the image to be the foreground color. So I’m thinking sort of a lighter yellow, maybe I’ll just pick it up from the palette here. So this is my foreground color. This is my background color and I have Apply per Tip enabled and foreground, background jitter at 100 percent. I’ve got hue jitter, saturation jitter and brightness jitter all at zero percent and purity at zero percent as well. What this brush is going to do is it’s going to toggle its colors between these two and so I won’t have to do any of the work myself. I’m going to close this dialog, make sure that I’m painting on a brand new layer, and I’m just going to start to paint. And you can see that the colors are toggling between the foreground and background color. And that just lets me paint my autumn leaves without having to do really much work at all.

Now I can paint as much or as little of these leaves as I want. I’m painting over the edge a little bit here because I’d like some leaves to be eventually underneath this stroke border so I’m just going to add plenty of leaves in there. And I’ll add a couple of stray leaves in the bottom here as well. I can add them by just single tapping or I can paint. When I’m happy with that the last thing I need to do is to get rid of the leaves that are actually over the image here. So I’m going back to my magic wand tool and I’m going back to my stroke layer here and with Contiguous enabled I’m just going to click inside this stroke layer. And what that does is it selects everything inside that layer. And now I can come onto my paint layer and I could do one of two things. I could just press Delete to delete the leaves that are inside this shape but perhaps if I wanted to add some more leaves later on it would be a better idea if I actually added a mask. And that’s very easy to do.

I’m just going to click here the Add Layer Mask icon. Now when I add my layer mask it’s working the wrong way around. You can see what it’s done is it’s clipped and hidden all the leaves around the outside and just left the ones in the middle. We want the exact opposite to be the case so I’ll click on my mask and press Ctrl and I and that just inverts the mask. So you can see now we’ve got the leaves on our image and they’re all around the edge of the image. It’s just that the stroke is underneath the leaves. There’s a very, very easy solution to that. I’m going to select the layer that contains the stroke and just move it up above the leaves and now the stroke is over the leaves. Before we leave this tutorial let’s have a look and see what would happen if we decided that instead of this green edge we would like a pink edge perhaps sampling the pink from this little girl’s headband. Well let’s go first of all and sample the pink. And this is the pink that I’m going to use so I have it selected as the foreground color. I want to make this stroke which is now green into pink.

Now if I press Alt Backspace I’m just going to make the whole layer pink and that’s not what I want to do. I just want to fill the pixels that are already filled on that layer. So I can click here to lock the transparent pixels on this layer, looking for this lock icon to appear. Now if I press Alt Backspace I’m just going to change the color of that stroke. And it’s picked up the foreground color in the image. And now I would just either drag this lock icon into the trash can here or I can just click this icon again. That would unlock it. So there you have an oval framed effect with some autumn leaves that you’ve created using a brush of your own in Photoshop.

I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out for more of my video tutorials on this YouTube channel and visit projectwoman.com for more tips, tricks and tutorials on Illustrator, Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom and a whole lot more.

Helen Bradley

Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Categories:photoshop, video

posted by Helen Bradley @ 5:28 amNo Comments links to this post

Saturday, January 19th, 2013

Output from Lightroom to your blog

I use Lightroom to prepare the images ready to upload to my blogs so it’s critical that I can get them out of Lightroom all ready to upload without having to do any more work on them.

On one blog I use framed images and therein lies a problem – the images need a thin keyline around them so you can see the edge. Without an edge the image would just blend into the surrounding white background of the blog page.

So, here’s how to create a frame effect in Lightroom – the images will be sized for the web with the appropriate resolution, they will have a frame around them, together with my name, and they will have a keyline around the image and around the page itself. And, to finish, it will all be saved as a reusable template.

Start outside Lightroom in any graphics or photo-editing program and create an image 500 x 600 pixels in size and filled with white. Save it as a jpeg format image and import it into Lightroom – place it somewhere easy to find.

Then, in Lightroom place the images for the blog post into a collection and add the empty image you just created to the same collection. For convenience I use a single collection for the images destined for my blog – it makes them easier to find and it simplifies the output process.

Switch to the Print module and select the collection. To configure the document size, from the Layout Style panel select Custom Package and from the Print Job panel set Print To to read JPEG file. Set the File Resolution to 100 ppi and select the Custom File Dimensions to 5 in x 4 in to make a landscape orientation image which will ultimately be created as a 500 x 400 pixel image. Set Color Management Profile to sRGB.

Now, drag and drop the first image into the work area and size it to suit. Choose Image Settings > Inner Stroke and then set the width to 0.2 pt black line. This will appear around the image.

Now drag the empty white image into an empty place in the work area and then size it to just smaller than the size of the work area. It will automatically have a line around it – the Inner Stroke setting is applied to all the images. To place this image behind the first image, right click it and choose Send to Back.

The text is added using an Identity Plate. To make one, click the Page panel and enable the Identity Plate checkbox. Click the small triangle in the Identity Plate box and click Edit and then click Use a styled text identity plate.  Type the Identity Plate text – for example, mine reads Helen Bradley | Photography – select and format it as desired. Click the Custom button, click Save As and type a name for it, click Save and then Ok to add it. Move it into position and size it to suit.

When you’re done click Print to File to print the image.

To save the design as a template you can use over and over again, click the + opposite Template Browser in the left panel. Type a name for the template.

In future you can select this template and use it to print another image. Before you do so, you will need to drag and drop an image into the image placeholder and add the empty image to the larger  placeholder. If you want to be able to print portrait orientation images, repeat the process to create a second template – you can reuse the empty image and the Identity Plate.

Helen Bradley

Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Categories:photoshop

posted by Helen Bradley @ 4:30 pmNo Comments links to this post

Sunday, January 6th, 2013

Photoshop Elements & Lightroom – Image Frame Effect

Use your preferred software to create an image frame effect in either Photoshop Elements or Lightroom.

Photoshop Elements:

See how to use the Custom Package in Photoshop Elements to create a neat frame effect for your photos, whether for print or for the web.

Lightroom:

See how to create a simple framed image effect in Lightroom 3 & 4. Includes an Identity Plate to display your name below the image.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial we’re going to look at creating a framed photo in Photoshop Elements.

I’m here in Photoshop Elements and I have my image already open. And I’ve sized it down just a little bit so that I can actually see around the surrounds of the image here in the window. That’s pretty important right now. Now I’m going to select white as my background color because I want to add some white around the image.

So first of all I’m just going to select around the image just by selecting over it. And I’m going to add a very, very narrow black border to it so I’m going to choose Edit and then Stroke Outline Selection. I’m going to add a white pixel black border on the Inside just so it’s easy to see and then just click Ok. And that will give my image just a one pixel black edge which will stop it from sort of bleeding into the white surrounds.

With white as my background color I’m now going to choose the crop tool and I’m going to select over my image with the crop tool. I’ve selected over and let go of the mouse button. That’s pretty critical the let go bit. And now I’m going to hold the Alt or Option key as I drag out on this corner handle. And see what happens when I do. When I drag outwards I’m adding some extra area around the image and because I’m using the Alt or Option Key the exact same amount of image is being added to the left and right of the image on top on bottom.

Now I want this to be a museum style frame so I’m actually going to let go the Alt or Option key and then drag down on this bottom so that I get some extra room here. And because white is my background color when I click the checkmark we’re going to have a white border around the image. Now if this were going up on the web onto a website that perhaps had a white background, I might add an extra black edge to it. So again I’ll go and select everything and I’ll go to Edit and then Stroke Outline Selection. I’m going to add a one pixel black inside. But you don’t have to do that if you’re perhaps going to print and you just want this nice muted down border effect.

Now the next thing to do is to add our text so I’m going to click on the text tool and click here on the image where we’re actually going to apply the text. Now I’m using Myriad Pro but for this image that’s way too big a font size. I’m thinking something like 12 points will be plenty and I’m just going to type in my name Helen Bradley and photography. And it looks like we’re using a white color so that’s a little bit difficult. Let’s go and get a dark gray instead.

Now once I’ve finish typing I can click the checkmark and then I can move it into position just using the move tool. So I’ll place it in position here. And then my image is ready to save or to print whatever I want to do with it.

I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this very quick video tutorial. Look out for more video tutorials on my YouTube channel. Visit projectwoman.com to find more tips, tricks and tutorials. And please if you like this video click the Like button.

Helen Bradley

Labels: , , , , ,

Categories:photoshop, video

posted by Helen Bradley @ 8:00 amNo Comments links to this post

Monday, October 22nd, 2012

Photoshop Heart Shape Crop

Crop an image to a heart shape or any other shape in Photoshop. Uses a filled shape and a clipping mask.

Check out all our tutorials on our YouTube channel.

Complete transcript of this video:

Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to crop to a heart or any other shape in Photoshop. Before we get started on this technique let’s just have a look and see what the end product is going to be. You can see here that I have an image of my cat. And what I’m going to do is to cut her face out in a heart shape. Now in Photoshop Elements this is relatively easy to do because there’s a cookie cutter tool that you can use. In Photoshop it’s not that easy. So we’re going to go through this step by step so that you know exactly how to do it. So let’s get started. I’m going to open up a duplicate of this image. And the shape that we’re using is a heart but this could be any shape at all. So it doesn’t have to be a heart and this process is going to be the same for any shape. The first thing we’re going to do is convert the background into a regular layer. And do that your favorite way. I’m just going to double click the layer and click Ok. And now I’m going to go and get my heart shape. So I’m going to click on the custom shape tool here, and I’m going to select a shape. Now I’ve already selected the heart I want to use but let’s have a look and see. There’s a couple of hearts here. There’s one in the sort of card collection, but I don’t actually like that very much. It’s a really sort of weird shape that one. I prefer this one here so I’m just going to select it, and then let’s go and add a new layer. So I’ve just added a new layer. And let’s go and select a color. Now it can be any color at all, and I’m going to make it this sort of black. It doesn’t matter what color it is. And we’re going to use pixels so this is really important this bit, the pixels bit. In earlier versions of Photoshop there’s actually three icons here and you want to select the one that is pixels. And I’m just going to draw my heart shape. And if it’s not in the exact right position I’m just got a hold the Spacebar as I draw the shape so that I can move it around. And this is actually a nicer shape so once I’ve finished drawing and I’m just going to let go. And now I have a black heart shape right over the top of my cat. It doesn’t matter what this color is because it’s about to disappear. It does matter that the order of these two layers is the wrong way around. So I’m just going to drag the bottom layer up over the top layer. So the photos are on top and the heart is underneath it. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to cut the photo to the heart shape and we do that using a clipping group or clipping mask. So with this layer selected I’m going to choose Layer, Create Clipping Mask. You see here that there is a keystroke that’s Alt Ctrl G. That’s something we could use as well. But what this does is it cuts the photo into the shape of the shape below. So if this were a star than we’d have a star shape. So essentially that’s all you need to do. If you’re already to go, go now because you know how to create a heart shape from an image. If you want to finish it off nicely than hang around and we’re going to finish it off. The way we’re going to finish it off is by adding yet another new layer, and we’re to drag it to the very bottom. And what we’re going to do here is to fill this with a nice color. So I’m going to choose a color of pink because this is a sort of Valentine theme. My foreground color is pink. I have the bottom layer selected. I’m going to Alt Backspace on the PC, Option Delete on the Mac, to fill it with pink. Now we have our heart shape image over pink we can crop it. So I’m just going to crop it to size. And we’ll come in a bit on the edge here too. And now we want that nice finishing touch that we had on the original image. Let’s go and see the original image. You can see that this one’s got dimension and ours is very flat. If you want that dimensional look what we’re going to do is we’re going to add a drop shadow. And we’re going to do it to this heart layer because we want to the drop shadow to follow the heart shape. Here is the layer effects tool, the layer style tool. I’m going to click here and choose Drop Shadow Now my drop shadow at the moment is black. I would prefer a color that is similar to this pink but perhaps a bit darker than it. So let’s just go and get a darker version of our pink. We’re on multiply blend mode which is a good blend mode. I don’t like the angle of light. I prefer my light to be cast in this direction. And you can see that I can now drag my drop shadow around to place it where I want it to be. It’s a bit harsh so I’m going to soften it. Now this is where Photoshop is a little confusing. I think they’ve labeled these really wrongly because size actually adjusts the feathering and spread really adjusts the size. So we don’t want it to have a very big size or spread, but we do want it to have a nice feathering so I’m going to adjust the size to suit there. And on the other one I added an inner glow so I want to grab inner glow here. I again changed the color, this time sampling the pink from the image and going for a lighter pink for my inner glow. And then we’ve got it screen blend mode so that’s going to work nicely. But we do need to increase the size here and probably increase the choke a bit. And we just wanted to blend that around the edge and click Ok. So this is an effect that you can create with any shape in Photoshop. You can put any shape in here. You can put your photo on top. You’re going to add a clipping mask or create a clipping mask with Layer. And this will say Create Clipping Mask. At the moment it says Release because that’s what we would be doing at this point because we already have clipping mask created and we’re just dropping a filled layer below it. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this Photoshop video. If you liked this video please would you give it a thumbs up so that others know that it’s a good video. Look out for more videos on my YouTube channel and look at projectwoman.com for more tutorials about Photoshop.

Helen Bradley

Helen Bradley

Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,

Categories:photoshop, video

posted by Helen Bradley @ 8:00 amNo Comments links to this post

Thursday, October 4th, 2012

Lightroom Frame a photo

Learn how to add an image as a frame to use in Lightroom to print around your images. Uses the Identity Plate option to do this. Shows you how to create the effect using one of our frames that we sell here and also how to do this using your own hand drawn frame.

Check out all our tutorials on our YouTube channel.

Complete transcript of this video:

Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can frame an image ready for printing inside Lightroom so you don’t even have to leave Lightroom to add a frame to it. Before we start on this process let’s have a look and see what our end product is going to be. I have here Lightroom open and you could do this in Lightroom 4 or 3 or 2. It’s not specific to Lightroom 4. I’m in the print module and here I have a series of images that I want to print. And what I’ve done is I’ve created this frame that now sits over this image. Now you can see that the frame pulls apart. So this image can be altered. So for example I can just change the image there, move the frame back into position, and I’m ready to print this. Now I can print it direct to the printer or I have these going to print to JPG because I want to use them on my blog. Now we sell these frames on projectwoman.com, and I’m using one of the frames that we sell. But let’s have a look and see how you can do that with your own hand-drawn frame or how you could use one of our frames to do it. And to do that we’re going to start in Photoshop if you’re using your own frame because you’ll need to create it yourself. Here I am inside Photoshop and I have a frame that I’ve already created. Now what I did was I took a piece of white drawing paper and a nice thick black felt tip pen and I drew this frame. And then I scanned it in using my scanner. But if you don’t have a scanner you could always just take a photograph of it. Now I’ve cleaned this up. And what I’ve done is I’ve cut out the middle so this is hollow in here. If I add a new layer below this, and let’s just go and get my Tools Palette, and let’s drop some color in there so that you can see that it’s actually a hollow frame. So let’s just go and get a different color to the frame color. And I’m just adding a filled layer beneath it so you can see that there is actually a hollow in the middle of the frame. And that’s really important because that’s where your picture is going to go. And here my frame I’ve added a boarder to it, so a plain blue border. But you don’t have to have a border. You could remove it. And this is just white with black. So once you’ve got your frame created what you’ll want to do is to save it, and I’ve saved mine as a PNG file. Now the reason I’ve used PNG is twofold. First of all you get a nice flattened document. But PNG will store transparency. You can’t store transparency in a JPG file. So you can’t use JPG for this because you won’t have a hole in the frame for your picture to sit in. So what I’ve done is create it as a PNG with this hollow cutout because when it comes to Lightroom that hole is still going to be there. So having saved it to disk, let’s just do that, File Save As. I just want to put this in a place that I know where it’s going to be. So I have a folder here for video images. So I’m just going to put my hand-drawn frame in there and just click Save so I know exactly where it is. I’m just taking the options here, just the standard PNG options from Photoshop. So let’s close that out, close down Photoshop for now and let’s go and get Lightroom again. Okay, so let’s go and get a different folder of images because I don’t want to start with anything that we’re sure of. And I know I’ve got some really nice Safari West animals. So let’s go with the animals. And let’s go to the Print Module. And let’s go to a brand new layout. So let’s close down this preview. And I’m just going to go and start with a brand new layout. It can be anything at all. I would set up my page. And I want to be working in landscape. I’m going to click Ok. And I want this to go to a JPG file. So I’m just going to set JPG there, and I’m working in a landscape letter size image. So everything’s looking perfect there except of course that this is not what I want my print job to look like. I have an Identity Plate turned on. So I’m going to turn that off for now. I’m going to get rid of these pieces. Okay, so now I’m going to add my first image. So let’s go and find an image that is in landscape mode because my frame is a landscape image. So let’s just go and get something. There’s some distinctly not Safari images in this folder by the looks of it. I really like this one so I’m going to add it in here. So I’m just placing it. Because we’re using a custom package I can just drag and drop the image into position. And Lightroom won’t let me skew this image so whatever I do with it it cannot be skewed out of alignment. So I’m just going to put the image there. And what I want to do is to put my frame over the top. It looks like we’ve got a few settings coming in with this image such as a photo border and an inner stroke. I’m going to take all of those off. And now let’s go and get our frame. And the way that we add the frame is from the Page Panel here. We going to add it as an Identity Plate. So I’m going to click to select Identity Plate. But I want to add my own so I’m going to click here and choose Edit. Now the type of identity plate I’m going to use is Graphical. So I’ll select that, and I’m going to locate the file that I created. Now one thing I didn’t mention that is critical is that the dimensions of this frame need to be the same dimensions as the image that you’re working on. So I’ve made mine the size of a letter size sheet of paper. Now it’s very large. That’s fine. I’m going to use it anyway. And I want to save this. So I’m just going to click Save As. And I’m going to put this blue hand-drawn frame and click Save, so now I can use it anytime and click Ok. And the frame is now added to the image. And I can size it. Now the reason why I have to make sure that it is a letter size frame is that Lightroom won’t let me scale it any larger than letter size. So I have to make sure that it’s in the correct proportions before I start. And I’ve got grids and guides turned off so we’ll be able to see everything really clearly. Now the reason why the frame is in front, and we do of course want it in front but we do need to check and make sure that it is in front, is that Render Behind Image is not turned on. So if we had it behind image than it would be behind the image. We want it on the top. Now I’m ready to print that. And once I’ve printed that I can then use it for another image. And all I’m going to do is move the frame out of the way a little bit, drag and drop a replacement image into position and then just put my frame back in. Now I’m ready to print the second image and then I could continue through to create other images ready for printing. If I want to save this, and typically having done the work of setting this up I would want to save it, I can either create a saved print which will save this print layout and the image or I can just save the user template. So I’m going to click here. I’m going to call this blue frame template. Blue frame one up will tell me that it’s going to be just one up, one image on this, and just click Create. And it’s going here into User Templates. And that means that I can select it any time in the future for any image at all, and it’s going to be preset for me. So there you have the ability to create your own framing for images inside Lightroom.

Helen Bradley

Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Categories:photoshop, video

posted by Helen Bradley @ 8:00 amNo Comments links to this post