jass, from what I see that grey border in the ‘classic’ web page style of Album just looks like the ‘soft edge’ drop shadow in the layer styles menu>drop shadows.
Since you said you know how to resize the canvas etc…I wasn’t sure if ya needed more help with this. Let us know.
Okay, thanks. I’m at work right now and can’t try it, but will do when I get home.
If, however, I just wanted to create a grey curved rectangle which blurs on it’s outside edge into a white background, but remains with a clean edge on the inside – what tool would I use to achieve that?
Thanks again
jass, here is one way ( you’ll find that Elements has dozens of ways to do the exact same thing); create a new layer above your image. With the rectangular marquee tool make a selection around that is larger than your image ( whatever size border you wish to have ) go to edit>’stroke’. Choose color grey you want, choose pixel size ( around 20 pixel) choose ‘center’, click OK. Now deselect and go to filter>blur>glaussian blur….around 15 to 20 ( you’ll have to experiment with these settings depending on your image size and res). Reselect>keyboard>delete. If you are using windows the stroke and reselect/select tools etc…can be found on your right click.
thanks – i’m gonna rush home and try it !!
Jodi,
Following your steps, I tried to select a rectangle larger than the image by by starting the mouse drag outside the image. However the resulting selection covered the image and nothing more.
Mark
Mark, not sure I’m following you…applying the ‘stroke’ command to the larger rectangular marquee selection puts a border line around the selection…it does not cover the image.
Mark,
You have to make the canvas larger than the image to do this. I believe however there is a way to do it in the way Jodi described, whereby in the same step you can use the marquee tool to go ‘outside’ the image and this automatically makes the canvas bigger / or the image smaller. I can’t remember how to do it though.
Anyone?
Jodi – or anyone….
I’m using the drop shadow command you first suggested as this best frames my images. Firstly, I’m making the canvas larger so that I have a white border around the original image – then I use the drop shadow layer style.
HOWEVER – what I can’t figure out now is how to do this and keep my image at a specific size. eg: 4 x 6 print size.
I have tried creating a ‘new’ document entirely – then creating the drop shadow – then putting in the image into a new layer and shrinking it to fit the space. This works. Unfortunately however, I’m opening my images to edit from within Photoshop Album which means I don’t want to create a new image. I just want to amend the original, put the frame in and close it so the image in PA updates itself.
Can you help?
One question…do you want the entire image to be only 4 X 6 ? In onther words, with the extra canvas ? If so then you’ll have to make your canvas 4 X 6 (white)and lower the size of your image so that the white border with drop shadow shows.
I did a quickie of using the method with the blurred stroke;
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http://www.frontiernet.net/~jlfrye/border.jpg>
of course, you cannot see the extra canvas since it’s on a white backgound and the canvas was white ..(duh (me)I just didn’t think of that when i did it.)
Yes – I want to cut it up at exactly 4 x 6. But my question is – if I start with an image from my digital camera – which might be huge – and then I want to end up with it on a canvas which is 4 x 6 with a drop shadow border, what actions do I have to do and in what order to achieve this?
Hope I’m making sense here…..
Thanks
…. so much for ‘simple’ grey border
first off, I need to know, is the image for web use or for print ?
ok well for print you’ll have to resize your image and since you want the whole thing(canvas)to be 4 X 6 your image will have to be even smaller than that. So first I’d say to resize your image…go to toolbar>image>resize>image size and uncheck ‘resample’put in one H or W dimension and the other will automatically change ( so again, largest end will be made smaller than 6 inches), click OK. Then you can go ahead and go to image resize>canvas size and put the 4 X 6 dimension in for your canvas. Make a new layer in the layers palette and slide it to the bottom…fill that with white…that is your canvas…you did know how to do the border around your image and drop shadow …right ? My head hurst really bad at the moment….I’m trying to make this as easy as possible…if ya need more help, I’m here.
You may notice that your image isn’t quite the right size over the 4 X 6 canvas ( for digital aspect ratio reasons )….you may want to grab the rectangular marquee and make a selection in your image and delete some of it ( select inverse>delete)…just an after thought.
Thanks Jodi, Your assistance much appreciated. I overcame the digital aspect ratio problem by cropping the image to just under 4 x 6 before creating the new layer !!!
Can you answer Mark’s question which got lost somewhere up here. Which was that originally you mentioned using the marquee tool to select just around the outside of your image. Mark appears to have tried to achieve this but without resizing his canvas first – which explains why the marquee tool appeared to just select the image.
However – I believe that in a tutorial from somwhere in the past I was told how to do exactly what he tried, which subsequently increased the canvas size just by selecting around the outside of the image. Perhaps with a keyboard combination held down at the same time or something like that.
Do you know?
ya, there is a trick to extend the canvas…select the crop tool>make a selection around entire image with the crop tool>press down alt+shift and drag out from corner to extend, commit.
