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So you have a nice picture. You want to upload it to the ThinkCamera gallery and show it all your friends or maybe just email it to a select few. You know all about the intricacies of resizing pictures (and if not then check out our feature!) but your pictures look a little dull on the screen. You want to make them cooler. You want to make a gallery mount.
It's a common problem - when you post your pictures they can look a little flat because they run into the web page or whatever else you have on your screen. In this tutorial we'll look at using Photoshop Elements to produce a simple gallery border. There are many variations you can try to make you pictures look individual once you have the basics.
Enough talk - time for pictures. We're going to go from this:
To this:
First things first. We are going to output this file to the web so we want to start by resizing and sharpening it so it will look great. Remember you should be working on a copy of your image!!
I started off by resizing to 600 pixels wide. If you need help with this then check out my tutorial. Then I sharpened the picture. Make sure you are viewing the file at 100% (Ctrl-Alt-0 / Cmd-Option-0) and go into the filter… sharpen… unsharp mask menu. The numbers you put in here are a matter of experience since they vary according to the picture. However, since we are viewing the whole image at 100% it's easy enough to move the sliders and see when you have a great looking image.
Since I had spent some time softening this image, I didn't want to make a hyper sharp image - just enough to give it some bite on the web. I settled for 80% with radius and Threshold set to their defaults of 1.0 and 0.
If you want to see how you are doing then click the tick in the “preview” box and toggle the effect off and on (in this screenshot the picture looks a little soft because I didn't resharpen the screenshot - you are viewing the main picture at about 60%).
The next step will be very familiar to anyone who follows my tutorials. Duplicate the layer by hitting Ctrl-J (Cmd-J), by going into the layer…Duplicate layer menu or by dragging the layer to the “new layer” button in the palette. I then double clicked on the layer name and named it. Your layers palette should look like this:
Now we're going to add a black border. Go into Image… Resize… Canvas size. The canvas is the thing the picture sits on. It starts the same size as the picture itself but we can change that.
Here I have set the measurement to percent and entered 7 for the width and 10 for the height. I used to use 10% for both but that makes the edges of the frame wider on a rectangular picture. Note that I've selected “relative” which means it will ADD 7% and 10%. Colour is black and the anchor is set to the middle (gray square next to the word “anchor”). This is very important - it will “anchor” the centre and add border all around our picture. Hit OK and here's what you get:
A nice black border around our picture. One option is to stop there be we are heading for something a bit more classy.
Look closely at the layers palette. The border has only been added to the background layer - canvas extensions only affect the background layer. Now hold down the Ctrl key (Cmd key on the Mac) and click on the “Suzy” layer in the layers palette. This selects the whole layer and you should see the picture change so that you have selection “marching ants” all around the picture but not around the border.
Go onto the edit menu and choose “Stroke (Outline) selection”. You'll get the following dialogue:
I set the size to 2 pixels and the colour to white. You may want to pick up a different colour - for example from Suzy's lipstick. Just click in the box next to “color” and then click with the eyedropper in your picture where you want to pick the colour from. Hit OK and then Ctrl-D (Cmd-D) to deselect the marching ants. Now you have a picture with a black border and white keyline that has much more punch than the original.
The finishing touch is to add your “studio” name. Go back into the canvas size dialogue. This time you are just changing the height.
Note though that I've changed the Anchor to being at the top rather than the middle. This adds the new space to just the bottom.
Now all you need to do is select the text tool, choose white and a nice font and type your name.
Save for web and upload to the gallery.
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