How to apply picture frame effects in Photoshop

Posted on July 3, 2009 at 5:12 am

Framing a portion of a picture is easy using basic cropping techniques. I will show you a cool technique that will emphasize a part of the picture without actually cropping the image. I call this technique the picture-frame effect and it will look something like below once completed.

Using this effect is simple. First open your picture in Photoshop then create a duplicate layer by pressing CTRL+J or right click on the original layer then select duplicate layer.

After duplicating the layer click on the rectangular marquee tool, select the image where you want to create the frame effect.

After selecting the part of the picture you want to emphasize click the Select and choose Transform Selection. You might want to rotate your selection to make it more appealing. After that, hit the Enter key then CTRL+J to duplicate your selection.

Click Add Layer Style then select Drop Shadow. Change the Size and Spread to 4 or 5 depending on your preference. Then click on the Drop Shadow option then change the color to white, the size to 5 or 6 and then change the position to inside then click ok.

After doing the steps above you will see a frame on the picture you have selected. To make the frame more realistic click on the original layer then de-saturate that layer. You can do this by pressing the Shift+CTRL+U keys on your keyboard. Do this a couple of times until you achieve the level of saturation that you want.