Dotted Frame Tutorial
Originally published at Solokuenstler. You can comment here or there.
Sometimes plain images are pretty boring and can be spiced up with some simple tricks.
Since some friends asked how I make the borders around images, here is a quick and dirty tutorial about a really simple way.
First, open the image (this is always the first step, I know.)
For demonstrative purposes I’ve chosen a simple magazine-scan.
Grab the polygon lasso tool and draw a border - with shift you can add more pixels to the selection, with alt you can remove some until you’re satisfied.
Then go either to Select -> inverse or if you as lazy as I am hit shift + ctrl + i
You could stop here - but you won’t.
Now comes the tricky part. A little offset. Don’t wonder, from here on I extented the canvas a little bit.
Let’s switch from layers to channels. Now we need an Alpha-Channel (If you don’t know what it is, check another tutorial on this site)
Create a new channel, go to Select -> Load Selection ->Layer xxx (the one with the image)
Fill the selection with solid white.
Then apply to the selected Alpha-channel a Gaussian Blur. The blur radius depends on the kind of effect you want to achive and the image size. The best method here is the common try-and-error.
Still in the Alpha Channel go to Filter -> Pixelate -> Color Halftone. Since we’re working with the Alpha-channel, the color options don’t matter. And again: Try and error.
For this Image I wanted to have small dots, so I chose a Radius of 4 pixels.
And again Select -> Load selection -> layer xxx -> invert.
Hit the del-button and you have a frame with funky dots.
You can erase a little with a soft brush and lowered opacity and apply some layer styles like inner glow and inner shadow for getting more effects.
