Seeing Double: Those Gorgeous Digital Frames - Digital Photography with Adobe Photoshop - Page 2
© Dan Osborn
To finish this off lets create a new background layer that is solid black for the photo to sit over. Press Ctrl + Shift + N and name the new layer "BG" - for background. Go to the Layers Palette and drag your new layer to the bottom - under the "Photo" layer. (Or you can press Ctrl + ].) To fill this layer with black set your Color Palette to the default black-n-white by pressing "d"; this makes the foreground color black and background color white. Finally hit Alt + Backspace. You should now have your photo sitting over a black background that extends 10 pixels from each side - more or less depending on how much you enlarged your canvas.
Step 3: The Inner Frame
I like to keep things organized so lets create a layer set for our frames. Go to Layer -> New -> Layer Set... and name it "Frame".
Create a new layer (Ctrl + Shift + N) and name it "Thin Outer Frame". We need to create a thin line around the photo. To do that hold down on the Ctrl button and click on the "Foto" layer. This won't select the layer in the Layers Palette; it will only create a selection - marching ants - around the photo. To create the thin line go to Edit -> Stroke and use the settings I have shown here on the image below.
It really doesn't matter what color you use as long as it's not black or white because we're going to change that in just a second.
Once you have stroked your selection hit Ctrl + D to unselect your selection. You should be able to see a thin line around your photo. Now lets change the color. We're going to use an adjustment layer to control the color of the frame so that you can change the color anytime you wish. Go to Layer -> New Adjustment Layer -> Hue/Saturation... Name the Adjustment Layer "Thin Outer Color" and make sure that the "Group With Previous Layer" is checked then hit "OK". Now it will pop up the customary Hue/Saturation dialog window. First click on the "Colorize" box to the lower-right. If you want to make the frame white then move the Saturation slider all the way to zero and the Lightness slider all the way to 100%. Now hit OK and see what happens. Look at the Layers Palette and notice that you have a new layer just above your "Thin Outer Frame" layer and indented just a little. To the right of the layers name are two boxes. The one on the right should be solid white which is fine. You can do some cool things with that but that's another article. What we're interested in is the box to the left. Double-click on it and it will pop the Hue/Saturation dialog window up again with the settings you put in. You can change the settings and then hit OK if you want. This way you can always come back and change the color as often as you like to anything you desire.
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