Golden Picture Frames

Framing your photos the electronic way

I love buying picture frames; there are so many to choose from. Though, lately I haven't gotten to do it much because I've been without a color printer. (Thankfully HP just remedied this situation by sending me their new HP 6980 wireless printer, which I'll be reviewing in the next week or so.) All that aside, I'm here to tell you that searching for *digital* picture frames is just as much fun, if not more.

Today I'm going to show how to easily pop the perfect photo into the perfect digital frame, and how taking a short journey over to iStockphoto can produce a glorious gaudy golden frame suitable for, well, Kings :)

Though we'll be using Photoshop Elements this time around, the steps are darn near identical in the full-blown version of Photohop.

Grab a guady gold frame

A quick search for "gold picture frame" on iStockphoto yielded this beauty, among many others (232, to be exact):

Step 1: The first thing we need to do is rotate this puppy to a landscape orientation instead of portrait. Press Command + T (PC: Ctrl + T) to invoke Free Transform. Hold the Shift key down while positioning the cursor about 1/4 in. outside the document bounds. When it turns into a little curved, double-ended arrow, start dragging upward and around until the photo rotates 90 degrees. Press Return to accept.

NOTE: If dragging isn't your bag baby... you can always hop up to the Options toolbar at the top of your screen and type 90 into the following slot to perform the aforementioned rotation:

Step 2: Now we need to make the canvas (work area) larger. Press C to select the Crop tool and draw a box around the image. Grab the left handle and pull it out to encompass the girth of our gaudy frame. Do the same on the right, then press Return.

Step 3: Pop open the photo you wish to frame. Press Command + A (PC: Ctrl + A) to select all. You'll see marching ants dutifully appear around the photo.

Step 4: Jump back to the frame document, and press W to select the Magic Wand. What we want to do here is select the inner portion of the frame, where we want the photo to go. Since it's solid white and the Magic Wand is made for selecting by color, it is our tool of choice. Click the white area inside the frame with said Wand. Marching ants should appear around it, like so:

Step 5: Choose Edit > Paste Into Selection, and watch as your photo magically leaps into the picture frame.

Step 6: This photo is slightly larger (it's higher resolution, rather) than the frame, however I can downsize it by pressing Command + T (PC: Ctrl + T) once again to invoke our friend, Free Transform. Hold down the Shift key as you drag one of the corner handles inward. Press Return to accept when you get it sized.

Step 7: Press V to select the Move tool and move the photo into just the right spot.

Shadow time!

Step 8: Let us now zap the white edes of the frame. Press W to select the Magic Wand and click on the white area outside the frame. Press Delete to send it packin'.

Step 9: Click the triangle to the left of Styles and Effects palette, which lives directly above the Layers Palette. Select Layer Styles from the pop-menu and choose Drop Shadows. Click the Low button, as shown below.

Step 10: Command click the New Layer icon (circled above in red, at bottom) to create a new layer *below* the current one. Press D to set the color chips in the main Toolbox to the default of black and white, then press X until white is on top. Fill the new layer with white by pressing Option + Delete (PC: Alt + Delete).

Tada! Easy as pie, right? Just think of the creative possibilties here! And if you're using the image onscreen only, on a web page, in a slide show, etc. these gorgeous digital pictures frames will only cost you a buck over at iStockphoto.

Until next week, happy framing!