Jay Arraich’s Photoshop Tips


	Make a Frame page two Press Ctrl and click on the Left layer which now contains the entire frame (half) that you’ve created so far. This will select the frame. Make sure the Info palette is visible. Choose Select > Transform Selection. While watching the W and H measurements (for Width and Height) in the Info palette, drag on the sides of the Transform Selection box to size the frame side lengths to be what you need for your picture. When the size is right, click the big check mark on the options bar to accept the transformed selection. Then choose Select > Inverse and press the Delete key to get rid of the extra frame length. After that, press Ctrl-D, or choose Select > Deselect. Next, from the Layers palette menu, choose Duplicate Layer. Name it Right. With this new Right layer selected, choose Edit > Transform > Rotate 180°. Use the zoom tool to magnify the upper right, and lower left corners to check for alignment. Then pick the polygonal lasso tool in the toolbox. Make a selection of the overlapping part of the frame, and press Delete, as we did with the first corner we made. The example below shows what the upper right corner looks like if I trim it when it was not aligned. I fixed the alignment by undoing the Delete, and selecting the move tool. The arrow keys were then used to nudge the frame into precise alignment. Repeat these select-and-delete steps on the bottom left corner. The frame edges should now all be complete, and trimmed. With the Right layer selected, go to the Layers palette menu and pick Merge Down. If the frame you are working on is small, and hard to see at 100 %, use the zoom tool to magnify a portion of the frame. We are going to color the frame, and you need to have a good view of your frame before we start. Choose Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation. In the first dialog box that appears, the New Layer box, be sure and check the Group with Previous Layer checkbox. In the Hue/Saturation dialog box, that shows up next make sure and select the Colorize checkbox. This is important, so don’t forget. Then play with the Hue, and Saturation sliders to make your frame a color you like. Make sure the Preview checkbox is selected so you can see what you’re choosing. When you find a color you like, click OK.	next back start Tips 7 Tools 7 Palettes
Tutorials Brushes in 7 Using PS7 Brushes 7 Basics 7 Reference: Tools 7 Reference: Palettes Reference: Filters Reference: Effects Selections Channels Basic Layers Basic Pen How Much? Color Management Color Correction Combining Images Combining Images II Combining Images III Compositing in Photoshop Perfect Blend Multicolor Fill Curves, Levels, or Brightness/Contrast? Dodge and Burn Duotones Styles On Masks Organic Textures Abstract Background Make a Frame 3D Wire Text Doodling
Older Tutorials Quick Mask Rubberstamping More Adjustments Sharpening Filters Color Elements Tutorials Elements Basics Reference: Elements Tools Reference: Elements Palettes How Do I...? Gotcha Pre-Beginner Pre-Beginner II Why Layers? Holes Fade In Playing With Styles Learning Effects Redeye Removal Artistic Filtering Symmetrical Flowers Simulated Alpha Channels Layer Masks Multilayer Masks Displacing Textures	Now, we need to add some highlights to the frame. This particular gradient scales quite well. Here is a one and a half inch wide frame corner which would be used for a very large image. A much smaller frame (with edges 30 pixels wide) is shown at the bottom of this page. I’ll use this larger one here, since it’s easier for you to see what I’m doing. It needs highlights on the most prominent ridge on the top and bottom of the frame. If you look at real frames you will see that they will have a little highlight which starts at the corner, and fades as it progresses inward across the frame. With the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer selected, click the New Layer button in the Layers palette. Press Alt and double click this new layer to rename it Highlights (version 5.5 users, simply double-click to rename). It’s very important that the highlights be on their own layer at the top of the layers stack, so don’t forget this step. With the Highlights layer selected, use the polygonal lasso to drag a protective selection line along the bottom of the most prominent ridge on the top of your frame. Click once precisely at the corner, and then press the Shift key and click again more than half way along the frame. Complete the selection, loosely by circling above the frame. The important edge of the selection is the inner edge of the ridge, below which you want to remain in shade. Pick the paintbrush in the toolbox. In its options bar, click on the Brush Dynamics icon at the far right end of the bar. In the pop-up palette, for Opacity, choose Fade, and set the steps for 60. You will need to experiment with the number of steps, depending on the length of your frame. The steps number determines how fast the brush stroke fades to zero opacity. [Please note: Photoshop 7 users will not find this dialog. In the new brushes palette, you need to choose the Other Dynamics panel on the lower left side of the palette. You'll then see an Opacity Jitter slider at the top of that dialog. Leave the slider at 0, but open the Control menu and choose Fade. You'll then be able to enter the number of steps as with the old dialog.] Pick a fat, soft brush from the brushes pop-up palette in the paintbrush’s options bar. Press the D key to make your colors the default black and white, and then press X, or click the switch colors icon in the toolbox to make white your foreground color. It’s the little double headed arrow in the upper right corner above the color squares. With the selection you drew, still active, click once, overlapping the selection edge at the corner. Be sure and overlap quite a bit. Press the Shift key, move along the top of your frame a fair distance within the selection, and click a second time to add the stroke. How far you need to go depends on the number of Fade steps you set in the Brush Dynamics box. If you didn’t go far enough, you can simply click Undo, and try again. There is no harm in making the second click too far, so err on the side of farther rather than nearer. The result should be a loud, white paint stroke that fades to nothing along the highlighted frame ridge. Undo it and fiddle with the number of fade steps if you want the highlight to be longer or shorter. Use a smaller or wider brush if the one you chose is too fat or thin. Please make a note to yourself to reset your Brush Dynamics opacity to Off from Fade, once you are finished making your highlights. If you forget, you will be pulling your hair out, when your paintbrush won’t paint properly the next time you use it. Once you have the highlight placed properly, and fading to zero in a distance you like, go to the Layers palette, and change the Highlights layer’s opacity to 50 %. The result looks like this. Alternatively, you can leave the Highlights layer opacity at 100 % and set the blend mode to Soft Light. This gives a more subtle highlight. Here is what the Soft Light highlight looks like. If you want to add multiple highlights to different parts of your frame, and would like some to be Soft Light, and others to be Normal at 50 % opacity, put the different types on different layers. If you save this frame with its layers intact, you can change the color at any time by double clicking on the Hue/Saturation icon in the adjustment layer, and changing the slider settings. You can then choose Save As and save the new color as a different frame. In addition, if you save a copy of the frame, at the point where we used Transform Selection, and before we trimmed the frame to size, you can use that as a starting point to make frames of different sizes, using Save As to head off in a different direction.. You can also use the custom gradient we have made to make frames of any width. The width of the selection you drag across determines the width of the frame. The gradient will work on any width. We are done with this frame. If you want to add this frame to an image, using the instructions in my other Frames tutorial, you will need to get rid of the white background. I like to have it there when creating a frame so I don’t have to look at the transparent checkerboard pattern that you see if you don’t have a background. To delete the background, double click the background layer to rename it and make it a regular layer. You don’t have to think of a name—just accept Adobe’s default of Layer 0. Then, with that layer selected, press Alt, and click the garbage pail icon at the bottom of the Layers palette to delete the white layer. Now go to the Layers palette menu and choose Merge Visible to put the entire frame on one layer. You might want to use Save As and give this merged version a new name so the layered version will be preserved. In the last section, I have some tips on how you can create your own custom gradients to make different frames. I would encourage you to experiment. Try making frames from very simple to totally outrageous. Continue on page three
	above; small frame with 30 pixel (wide) sides
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Make a Frame

Copyright © 2004 by Jay Arraich. All rights reserved. All photographs copyright ©2004 by Jay Arraich jay@arraich.com

Copyright © 2004 by Jay Arraich.
All rights reserved.
All photographs copyright ©2004 by Jay Arraich
jay@arraich.com