Jeff St John 
ePhotoPros Staff
The OC
Forum Fanatic
Posts:535
 | | 08/18/2008 8:03 PM |
| This week, another variation on the "sloppy" border using a stock texture image. The cool thing about making a border this way is that you have an unlimited source of border-making material. Heck, you could shoot the wall or an interesting rug and use it as the base for a sloppy border. Anyway...
- My document was around 10 x 7 at 240 dpi (this was the size of the texture). I dropped in a 4x6 at 240 dpi. It's important that both texture and template size be the same resolution.
- With the texture layer active, I CTRL clicked the 4x6 placeholder layer's thumbnail (the layer beneath it) to load it as a selection
- Then I placed guides all along the edges to define the 4x6. I placed another set of guides about a half inch from the edges, and yet another set of guides about and eighth of an inch from the second set of guides.
- Now, the reason I didn't just drop in a texture onto a 4x6 canvas, is that I like to see where all the imperfections in the texture are when I line up the texture to fit inside the eighth of an inch guides. I like seeing the entire image before me rather than having most of it offscreen. I hope that makes sense.
- Once I found the right texture to fit inside the guides, I drew out a rectangular selection around the middle guides, then holding ALT (Mac: Option), I subtracted the center of the selection, still using the rectangular marquee tool, following along the innermost guides.
- I then inverted the selection by pressing Shift CTRL I and deleted everything outside the selection
- Next, I CTRL clicked the 4x6 placeholder thumbnail to load it as a selection, then chose Image > Crop to crop it to the 4x6 size
- I then desaturated the texture border by pressing Shift CTRL U and used Levels to darken it up quite a bit
- From here, I hit CTRL J to duplicate the border layer, then CTRL [ to move the duplicated layer down a layer (under the original)
- On the duped layer I chose Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal & Flip Vertical, and then free transformed it to be slightly off from the main border. I then lowered the opacity to 50%
- I repeated this step once more for the duped layer to add some thickness to the border
- I then duplicated the main border layer (that's still at full opacity at this point), flipped the new layer both vertically and horizontally, then lowered the opacity of the original border layer to about 80%
- Back on the new layer, I made a rectangular selection around the outside of the opening, a few pixels from the edge, inverted the selection, and hit delete. This left me with a thin border on the inside. At this point, I merged all the border layers by selecting them all with the Shift key, and pressing CTRL E
- I then held CTRL and clicked the add new layer button to add a new blank layer under the border
- Next, I made another selection around the outside of the opening, a few pixels from the edges, and on the new blank layer, inverted the selection and filled it with white
- Not content with square edges, I selected the border layer, drew out a rectangular selection loosely around the edges, and entered quick mask mode where I inverted the selection by pressing CTRL I
- Then I selected Filter > Distort > Ocean Ripple and exited quick mask
- My selection was a little off so I chose Select > Transform Selection and positioned the selection so that the jagged edges overlapped the outside edges of the border. When I hit delete, the straight, square-edged borders vanished with some extra sloppy rough edges in their place.
- Finally, I merged the white border and the black sloppy border layers
You really can use just about any texture to make a border which makes this technique extremely flexible. Happy border making!
jefe
| | | |
|