Painting custom border effects

One of things that you may have discovered about Photoshop is that if you play and if you tinker a little bit, you'll discover that there are so many different ways to do the same thing. Well, here I want to show you another technique, another way for creating a border or an edge effect. In order to create this effect, let's go ahead and click on the Adjustment layer icon, and this time let's just choose a Solid Color. Here, let's go ahead and choose a color for our border or our edge. Perhaps we want to use black or maybe even white. Next click OK.

Well, here we can see that this white, well, it's covering up all of our image. So we need to click into the mask-- not the adjustment but the mask. You will notice there are these little brackets around the mask showing me that that's what I'm targeting and then double-click that. This will open up our Properties panel, and here we can choose Invert. That will then fill this mask with black so that it's concealing all of the white. We can't see any of this white adjustment. The next step is to go ahead and choose our Brush tool.

With the Brush tool, what I want you to do is to choose a creative brush. If you scroll down, you have a number of different creative brushes. Say, for example, one like this, we can go ahead and increase the brush size and then click and paint across our image. We want to make sure we're painting with white, and we want to make sure we're painting on this mask. And as we move our cursor across the image, we're able to paint on this masked layer, and this gives us the ability to have this really sharp or fine tune edge.

We can also get really creative with edges like this, based on the different types of brushes that we have. For example, if we go back to our Options bar, we can choose this brush which I had selected previously, this Leaf brush. Here, I'll make the size a little bit smaller and then go ahead and just click and drag around the edge of the image. As we do that, you can see really what's happening is it's filling up that edge with this particular brush, which happens to be this leaf pattern. And this just makes for something which is kind of interesting or fun.

And in a sense all that's happening is in this Solid Color layer, we're just revealing or concealing part of this Solid Color. We can change this by double-clicking on this icon here and choosing a new color and that's then just going to sit on top of our photograph. And by using this technique and by really understanding masking, we can constantly make changes to this until we find something that we think might work well with our particular photograph. We can also change the overall intensity of the opacity there or the saturation or brightness value, and again, you have a lot of options.

And the beauty of working with masks, as I've mentioned before, is that they're flexible, they're continually editable. You can always make changes after the fact. And if you don't like, perhaps, something that you've created with one brush, you can always click in your mask and go ahead and choose another brush. Here, I'll go ahead and choose perhaps a more normal soft edge brush. Then next, what I'm going to do is I'm going to paint with black because I don't like some of these leaves here which have come into the picture, so I'll go ahead and paint with the black in order to hide those.

So I'm now erasing or hiding those by simply clicking and painting in that mask and customizing what's appearing here in regards to the overall edge or border effect. And by doing this, well, it just gives us a lot of flexibility, and sometimes it enables us to come up with some pretty creative and interesting effects.