Framing my way

As promised the other day, here is how I frame my photos to hide the camera data.

Bear in mind, that I didn’t actually set out to hide the information, but ito copyright, I’m not going to change it. No matter how irritating it is to some people who need to validate how photos are taken. As far as I’m concerned, that’s their problem… I know how the photo was taken, and that’s all that matters.

The other nice thing about the way that I do it, is that once it’s set up, I just drag and drop the photo onto the template, and then save. There’s no need for resizing because it’s all set up within the template so my photos that I upload are generally less than 300k each.

Also, I use Photoshop Elements 5, so I’m not sure whether other versions of PS have these functions, but look for them.
1. Create a new blank file. I make the size of the canvas 640×480 pixels, with a white background.

2. There’s a function on PSE5 called “artwork and effects” that I use to create the frame (look in the palette on the right of the screen below). There are a few options available such a backgrounds and frames and graphics etc. Now this is the part that I’m not sure about it’s existence in other versions.

I’ve added a pic of what the screen looks like, so you can try and find the function.

3. I drag and drop a frame, in my case the black 20px onto my background. It appears as a small frame in the middle of the background. Then I just resize the frame until it covers the entire background.

4. Then I drag and drop and photo onto the frame. Because I started with a blank canvas, and the whole file is a PSD file and not a JPG to start with, the data from the photo being copied onto the frame is lost.

5. It then looks like this… notice that it’s still a background with a frame.

6. Then I add a new layer on top of this, by going to Layer -> New -> Layer. I use the text writing tool to type my siggy on the photo. I don’t do a fancy thing though, like some other bloggers I know.

And finally it looks like this…

7. Now that it’s done, I save the .psd file and name it a template. I’ve also done the same for a portrait frame template. So… when I want to post a photo, all I do is drag and drop a photo onto my template and then re-save it as a jpg file. The re-saving flattens the layers, and because of the size of the template, the end result is much smaller than the original photo.

… Viola! Hopefully that made sense and you can follow this with your version of PS. Let me know if you want me to explain the siggy thing in more detail.