Medium Format Frames

This is a popular technique that brings a real "pro-photographer" style to showing your work, as it incorporates the look of a slide. I've seen this used everywhere from photographers' online galleries and postcards for studios, to prints in wedding albums. Although it's got a few steps, it's very easy to do.

Step One

From the File menu, create a new document set at approximately 9x7" at 300 ppi. Create a new layer by clicking on the Create a New Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette. Press M to get the Rectangular Marquee tool, press-and-hold the Shift key, and draw a square selection in the center of the image area.

Step Two

Press D to set your Foreground color to black, and then press Option-Delete (PC: Alt-Backspace) to fill your square selection with black. Deselect by pressing Command-D (PC: Control-D). Now, you'll need to make another square selection using the Rectangular Marquee tool inside the borders of your black square. Just for the sake of authenticity, I usually make this selection a little off-center, with a tiny bit more space on the left side than the right (which comes in handy later when you're adding text).

Step Three

Press Delete (PC: Backspace) to knock a hole out of your black square, and then press Command-D (PC: Control-D) to deselect. To make it into a realistic-looking image slide, you're going to add text in the next step, but first, click on your Foreground color swatch and choose a dirty yellowish color in the Color Picker (I used R: 199, G: 185, B: 91).

Step Four

Press T to get the Type tool, and in the Font pop-up menu in the Options Bar, choose either Helvetica Bold or Arial Bold as your font, and then choose a small size in the Font Size pop-up menu (adjust your tracking if needed in the Character palette, found under the Window menu). Now, click near the left side of your frame and type any two-digit number as your frame number (I chose 21). Press the Spacebar eight or nine times, type "KODAK VHC-2456," and then hit the Spacebar another eight or nine times and type the sequential two-digit number (22 in this case). Press Enter to set your type.

Step Five

Go under the Edit menu, under Transform, and choose Rotate 90° CCW. This turns your type vertically. Press V to get the Move tool, and then position your type over the left side of the frame. Then, get the Type tool again, type the number "2," press Enter, rotate it 90° CCW, and use the Move tool again to position it on the right side of your frame.

Step Six

Click on the Create a New Layer icon in the Layers palette. Press Shift-L until you have the Polygonal Lasso tool, and then draw a tiny triangle pointing upward on the right side of your frame below the number 2. Press Option-Delete (PC: Alt-Backspace) to fill it with your Foreground color, and then press Command-J (PC: Control-J) to duplicate it. Using the Move tool, drag this second triangle near the top-right side of your frame. Now, you're going to merge all those Type and triangle layers into just one layerthe frame layer. Hide the Background layer from view by clicking on its Eye icon, and then, in the Layers palette's flyout menu, choose Merge Visible.

Step Seven

Open the photo you want to apply the effect to. Go back to your frame document, get the Move tool, and drag-and-drop your frame onto your photo. Press Command-T (PC: Control-T) to get Free Transform, press-and-hold the Shift key, and scale the frame down within the document (if needed, press Command-0 [zero] [PC: Control-0] to see your bounding box). Click inside your frame to drag it into position, and then move your cursor outside the bounding box to rotate the frame a little. Press Return (PC: Enter).

Step Eight

Press Command-J (PC: Control-J) two more times to create the other two frames. Use Free Transform to reposition and rotate them slightly in opposite directions. Press Return (PC: Enter) to lock in your transformation. (Note: Make sure all three frames overlap a bit.)

Step Nine

Get the Polygonal Lasso tool again, click somewhere within one of the black frames, and begin tracing around the outside of your frames. You just click once, move your mouse to the next corner, click again, and the tool draws a straight line between the two points. You want to click around all the frame edges, avoiding the areas where the frames intersect in the center. Once you get all the way around to the first point where you started, you'll see a tiny circle appear in the bottom right-hand corner of your Polygonal Lasso cursor, letting you know "you've come full circle." Click on that first point, and the lines will join to create a selection (you will have all the frames and their contents selected). Now, go under the Select menu and choose Inverse, so you have everything but the frame selected.

Step Ten

In the Layers palette, click on the Background layer, and then hit Delete (PC: Backspace) to remove all of the background photo surrounding your frames, which creates the impression that you've pieced together three medium format images to create this one image. Press Command-D (PC: Control-D) to deselect. See, I told you this was gonna be easy.