Would you like to add a edge effect to your image that resembles the wearing away and aging of brushed on photo emulsion? You can quickly shape and blend parts of your photograph with the Brush tool.

You start by making a new image with the same dimensions as the photograph you want to frame with the edge effect. In this case, I selected 12x8 with 240 ppi.

I chose the Rough Round Bristle brush and then selected 400 pixels as the size (100% opacity and 100% flow).

You will find that fancy brushes can be slow when you use a large size and drag them across large portions of an image. There are a lot of calculations going on as Adobe Photoshop tries to simulate the behavior of individual brush bristles. I frame the edge with strokes. In this case, I used horizontal strokes across top, bottom, and sides. You could try different strokes for different effects. Diagonal, curves, etc.

If you did not append the Thick Heavy Brushes to your available set of brushes, you can restore the default brushes Reset Brushes... menu item from the Brushes palette.

The next step is to fill in the image with black. I used a 300 pixel wide hard edge brush. Nothing special. You could use a brush with a rough edge in places if you wanted to add streaks or scratches. Where you now see black or gray, your image will show through.

Go to the Channels palette and duplicate either the Red, Green, or Blue channel. I rename it to something like "Emulsion Frame Mask."

The mask is not quite done yet. If you tried to use the mask, your image would appear around the edge and the center would be white (or whatever color underlies your Background layer).

Press ctrl-i on the PC (cmd-i on the Mac). This will invert the alpha channel. Now the mask will allow you to insert your photographic image in the center on your framed edge.

Your mask should look something like this . .

You need to load your mask as a selection. Click on the RGB composite image. Then hold down the ctrl key (cmd key on the Mac) and click on the alpha channel for your mask. You should see the familiar marching ants for your selection. Go back to the Layers palette. Time to load your image. Press ctrl-a (cmd-a on the Mac) to select the entire image and then ctrl-c (cmd-c on the Mac) to copy the image to the clipboard.

To place the image inside your frame, you click on the duplicate layer you created to make it active and select "Paste Into" from the Edit menu.

That's the final step! Your image should appear inside your painted edge frame. Where the brush stroke was black, you get the image in its entirely. Where the brush stroke resulted in gray, the image sort of peeks through, and where there was white, you get the cololr underlying your Background layer (white in the typical case).

Have fun with this quick and easy frame edge effect! Cheers!

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