boydphoto

i had a great free one before i reformatted. now i have gone all over the web searches, to no avail. do you know where i could fine one? thanks, boyd.

Rantin Al

Bad News: http://www.extensis.com PhotoFrame $200
Better News: http://www.autofx.com/ Photographic Edges (Bundled) $200
Good News: http://mardiweb.com/web/photoedge5/photoedge5.htm Roll your own for free.

(No offence intended to Extensis or Auto FX, both fine products)

boydphoto

i used your last suggestion, and it works great. thank you. boyd

Rantin Al

No problem, it is easy to save out your own masks for re-use so you can build up your own library.
Get hold of some "dirty brushes" or create your own for real customization.

Have fun, Al.

Rick

His instructions are for PSP, how do you conert those images to a layer mask in PS?

Welles

Rick, I looked at the free page which Al linked and saw the ten frames at the bottom. Are those the ones you are trying to make work? If so...

Drag the edge.gif to your computer. Open the image you wish to mask in Photoshop. Open the edge.gif image and resize it to the dimensions of your image. Once resized, Select All Control (Command) + A and Copy. Now bring your image forward, add a layer mask. Go to the Channel's Palette and you will see the layer mask is an Alpha Channel. Highlight that new channel and make it visible then paste the edge.gif you copied.

Once the frame is copied in the layer mask it will look like a quick mask. If you switch off visibility in the Channels Palette it will just be a selection. If you just click on any other layer or the image itself the quick mask visibility will go away. If you are sure you want that frame you can always right click and select Apply Layer Mask.

A second but destructive technique would be to copy the edge.gif once it is resized, paste it to a new layer. Control (Command) + Click on that new layer to load the visibility mask, make your image layer active and hit delete. Throw away the edge layer.

sofbol7

I'm going to download that last one when I have the time, I've always done it the hard way, using layers, the polygonal lasso tool, etc, maybe this will save time [excited]

Rantin Al

I didn't even notice that it was for PSP.

Just a wee simplification of Welles suggestion.

After opening the image you want to use as the edge mask:

1 Select All then Copy.
2 In your working image, add a mask.
3 Alt+click on the mask thumbnail and paste.
4 Command+T and scale to fit.

Back in the Layers Palette, click on the image thumbnail to view.

This method opens the greyscale mask channel directly.
Watch the Channels Palette to see what is happening.

Create your own greyscale edge patterns at a fairly high resolution and you can just scale down without really affecting the definition as you might get when scaling up.

You can always run the G-Blur, or even sharpen it for that matter.
Just work on that greyscale channel directly.
Experiment, that's where the fun is. Try copy/ pasting a whole image directly into the mask and see what happens.

Did I mention something about a wee simplification somewhere?

That Alt+click on the mask thumbnail is really handy, honest.

Cheers, Al.

Welles

Rantin Al

Warning! The Stroker Virus is spreading. :B