Technique 31. Burned-In EdgesVersion 1

Technique #31. Burned-In EdgesVersion 1

Adding slightly darker edges to the photooften known as burned-in edgescan help focus attention on the center of an image and add drama. In typical Photoshop fashion, there are many different ways to achieve this result. We'll look at three different methods over the next three techniques.

key cocepts

quick mask

blend modes

Here's the photo for this example (and for the next two techniques, so you can compare the results). This first method can be done very quickly, but doesn't offer a lot of flexibility should you want to tweak the results.

Step One.	Add a new layer above the Background layer by clicking on the Create a New Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette, and then fill the layer with black. A simple way to do this is to press D to set the Foreground and Background colors to the default, and then press Option-Delete (PC: Alt-Backspace), the shortcut for Fill with Foreground Color.
Step Two.	Using the Rectangular Marquee tool (M), click-and-drag a large selection, leaving a slight border on the photo. From the Select menu, choose Feather and enter a high valueI used 60 in this case. Note You can take advantage of Quick Mask mode (Q) to help determine how much to feathersee the Key Concepts section for details.
Step Three.	Press Delete (PC: Backspace) and then Command-D (PC: Control-D) to Deselect. Lower the Opacity of the black border layer and experiment with the layer blend modes, such as Multiply. Here I set the Opacity to 35% and used the Multiply blend mode. Variation Here, instead of adding a layer filled with black, I duplicated the Background layer by pressing Command-J (PC: Control-J), changed the layer blend mode to Multiply, and then selected and deleted the center area of the photo. Variation 1