471 Framing a photo with a custom brush

Hey, gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. You may recall, last week I showed you how to create what's known as a custom dual brush inside Photoshop. And then I showed you how to texture that brush in order to create this effect here. Well this week, we're going to take that same textured brush and we're going to use it to paint a custom frame around a photograph. And we're not going to do so using the standard brush tool. You can if you like, but instead we're going to take a more disciplined approach and paint around a path outline. Here, let me show you exactly how it works.

All right, here's the final version of the photograph set inside of a clipping mask frame that I painted using a custom brush. I'll go ahead and switch over to the original flat image which comes to us from the Fotolia image library, about which you can learn more and get deals at fotolia.com/deke. I want to move this image to it's own layer while leaving the background intact, and the easiest way to do that is to tap the D key so that you get your default foreground and background colors, and then press Control A or Command A on the Mac to select the entire image.

And then press Control Shift Alt J on a PC, Command Shift Option J on a Mac. And the reason for those keys is Control or Command J, that jumps the image to it's own layer, but it also creates a duplicate. We don't want that, which is why you're also pressing the Shift key to move the image instead of duplicating it. And then by virtue of the fact that you have the Alt or Option key down, that forces the display of the new layer dialogue box, which I'll go ahead and call Kiddo and click OK. Alright, now we want to turn the layer off for a moment and click on the background once again to make it active.

And then create yet another layer by pressing Control Shift N or Command Shift N on the Mac, and I'll call this layer Frame and click OK. Alright, now there's a couple of different ways to work here. You could just set in painting your own custom matte if you want to, totally up to you. But what I'm going to do instead is trace a path outline. And to do that, we first need to know how big the path outline needs to be. Now this next trick only works in the most recent version of Photoshop CC, and it's just the way it is. And what you do is you go up to the View menu and choose New Guide Layout, which is a really great new command.

And then you get this dialogue box that allows you to break your image into regular columns and rows. That's not what we want though, so just go ahead and turn columns and rows off as you see here, and then turn on the margin checkbox and set all four of the margins to 200 pixels each, these two checkboxes want to be off, and then go ahead and click OK to create those guides. Now, go to the window menu and choose the paths command in order to bring up the paths panel. Let's go ahead and create a new path by dropping down to a little page icon at the bottom of the panel, and Alt or Option clicking on it, which forces the display of the new path dialogue box, so that we can name this path Frame and then click OK.

Alright, now go ahead and drop down to the rectangle tool and click and hold on it and choose the rounded rectangle tool from the shape tool flyout menu. And then I'll go up to this first option up here in the options bar and change it from shape to path. And then just go ahead and draw a rectangle from one guide intersection to another. Alright, now what we want to do is bring up the properties panel by going up to the window menu and choosing the properties command. And then inside the panel, once again, in Photoshop CC, we have these round corner options.

Right now all the corners are linked together, which is exactly what I want. And so I'm going to change any one of these round corner values to 400 and then press the Tab key and they will all change to 400 in kind. All right, now what you want to do is switch to the brush tool, and then go up to the Window menu and choose the brush command. And as you can see here, I'm looking at that brush that we created last week. Just to fill you in on the details, I set the shape dynamics in the last movie so that the control for the size jitter is turned off, which means that the brush is going to randomly fluctuate in size.

And I also assigned this texture, which happens to be this guy right here, Dots 1. Invert is turned off, the brightness is set to -150. Now, if you didn't create this brush along with me, then those of you who are premium members and have access to my exercise files, you can go ahead and load the brushes by clicking on this brush presets button, which will take you to the identically named panel. And then click on the flyout menu in the upper right corner of the panel and choose Load Brushes. And then just go ahead and navigate to the sub folder and load this document right here, PaintandPowder.avr and that will give you all the brushes that we created over the course of the last two movies.

I already have them, so I'll just go ahead and cancel out. And then you want to click on this final preset here, Textured Blast, and that will give you all the settings you need except for one. And so the one change you need to make is to go back to the brush panel and then click on texture in order to select it, and change the blend mode right here from multiply to overlay. And now, you can go ahead and hide that panel. Now with both a brush tool and the path outline selected, just press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac in order to stroke the rounded rectangle with that custom brush.

Now that's going to leave a few gaps here and there. And to fill those in, just press the Enter key or the Return key on a Mac a second time in order to stroke the path outline once more. All right, now we want to fill in the center of the path outline by Control or Command clicking on its thumbnail here inside the paths panel that will convert the path outline to a selection, and then you want to press Alt Backspace or Option Delete in order to fill the selection with black. And then you can press Control D or Command D on the Mac in order to deselect the image.

All right, now I'm going to switch back to the layers panel. I no longer need the guidelines, and they're pretty distracting, so I'm going to go up to the View menu and choose Clear Guides to get rid of them. And now, I'll turn on that kiddo layer that contains the photograph, and then I'll press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac and click on this horizontal line between the frame and kiddo layers, in order to convert that frame to a clipping mask. Alright, now we need a little more definition around the edges, so with the frame layer selected, drop down to the FX icon and choose Inner Glow.

And I came up with this color right here. I'll go ahead and click on the color swatch. It has a hue of 30 degrees, a saturation of 100%, and a brightness of just 15%, at which point I'll go ahead and click OK. You want to change the blend mode now from screen or whatever it is, to multiply. The opacity value should be 100%, and I cranked the size value up to 200 pixels. And so having done that in advance, I'll just go ahead and click OK in order to accept that change. And now it's totally up to you if you want to make further modifications.

You will have some weird edges here and there because of the way Photoshop randomly sizes the brush. And so, if that bothers you, you can just click at some locations, I don't recommend you drag because you will get random sizes as you drag. It's better to click. And every once in a while, your brush is going to get very small, in which case just click and that will switch to either a smaller brush or a larger one. So, every single time you click, the brush is going to sit here and change size. Alright, so now I'll just go ahead and click along this bottom edge in order to fill it out.

And we've got a tiny brush, which isn't really going to do me any good, but now it's growing back up, so that's good. And then over here, I might click a few times in order to add a very dinky brush at that location there. And a larger one here. So these are what, by the way, Photoshop calls brush tips. But we actually have a dual brush tip, so two tips are getting painted at a time every time I click inside this image. And so I think I'll just click just a couple more times up here in the upper left corner. Again, if you get a small brush, just click again in order to switch to a larger one, or at least randomly modify it's size.

That looks pretty good to me, so I'll just go ahead and press the M key to switch back to the rectangular marquee tool, and I'll press Shift F in order to switch to the full screen mode. And that's how you paint a custom frame as a clipping mask using a combination of a textured dual brush along with a path outline here inside Photoshop. Next week, Thanksgiving is right around the corner and you may be entertaining. In fact, you may be very entertaining, which is why I'm going to show you how to create these custom place cards for your dinner guests that include photographs on one side, and names on the other side inside Adobe Illustrator.

Deke's Techniques each and every week. Keep watching.