Adding a realistic handmade border with PhotoShop tutorial

Neil February 19th, 2008

Final image result:

Double Smiles

Download the fiberglass insulation texture used in this tutorial. Visit Texture King.com

This photoshop tutorial attempts to mimic the traditional printing processes such as Daguerreotype, wet plate collodion, hand painted emulsion and filing the negative carrier for full frame prints. These traditional photographic processes created printing effect that were generated as light passed through the negative, or print material leaving artifacts of hand made imperfection. Modern printing papers such as Innova, Hahnemuhle Paper, and Moab offer the digital artist a fast and tactile solution for creating wonderfully warm pieces in Photoshop.

So the object in Photoshop is to use layers and blending modes to create the effect of light passing through an imperfect emulsion. To do this you will need at least two layers, one in a darkening type mode such as Darken, Multiply, Hard light, or normal mode with light pixels erased. To finish the effect realistically, a second border must be applied over the darkening border so that the two borders interact three dimensionally.

Other shot’s I’ve created borders for:

Courtney & Charlie organic antique

You can download some border and edge effects from several Flickr Groups….

UPDATE: 10/31/08 - custom borders can now be achieved with some control from within Lightrom using OnOne’s PhotoFrame 4

Photoshop Document tutorials included in the Light Touch Texture Package

photoshop border tutorial package

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2 Responses to “Adding a realistic handmade border with PhotoShop tutorial”

  1. # Alfonsoon 30 Sep 2008 at 4:19 pm
    1

    Hello,
    my biggest compliments for your skills; I’d like to know which texture and its blending mode you used for the picture below, I really like the effect. I love old processes and have no patience to learn collodion, but I have to say I can do some photoshop.
    If you were so kind to say….

    Thank you in advance

    AlfonsoVQ

  2. # Neilon 30 Sep 2008 at 8:58 pm
    2

    I have a copy of OnONE’s PhotoFrame software, and am looking forward to the new version 4.0 that will operate with many of the fuctions I use in Photoshop.