Create a photo-frame for your Instagram Photos

This week on Coffee Break Photography, I will show you an easy way to apply a digital photo frame to your photographs.

A few days ago, I received an email from a pal who started his photography journey on one of my Switch to Manual workshops. He posted his photos on Instagram and saw someone there make it look like they had framed all their pictures with a white mount and a black frame. He wondered if I knew which app would help to do this kind of thing. If you have Adobe Photoshop, then you already have the tool that can do this for you, and it’s incredibly simple, requiring just two button presses. Let me show you how.

Creating a frame and mount

OK, so we’ve opened our photograph up in Adobe Photoshop and we’re going to start applying the white mount and black frame. To do this, we are going to change what’s called Canvas sizes. We’ll go up to the image menu, click on canvas size. We can also use the keys option command C or alt control C if you are on Windows. That will open the canvas size menu. The first box I need to make sure is always checked is this checkbox of relative. Relative indicates as it says there whether the new size dimensions are absolute or relative to the size of the image. So, we want to do things which are relative to the size of the image.

We’re going to create the white mount first of all, so we are going to change the extension colour to white. Now we’re going to change it, not by the number of pixels but we are going to change the unit to percentage. I’m going to apply a percentage of 15% to both the width and the height of this image. Click on OK and you can see we’ve got a nice white amount all the way around the image which is 15% relative to canvas size that we applied it to.

So, we are going to do the same thing now to apply a black frame around the edge. Click on Image, Canvas Size, then change the extension colour to black. Change the unit to percent. This time, I’m going to make it a nice contemporary-looking border, so just 5% relative to the size of both the white mount and the picture. 5 and 5 on width and height. Click on OK, and we’ve got a really nice black frame all the way around a white mount.

Creating an action

Fairly simple, but I would like to make it even easier. So to do that I’m going to apply whats called an action. So just press command and Z a couple of times and that will take me all the way back to the original image. You can find the actions panel over here on the right-hand side which looks like a play button. If you can;t see it just go to the windows menu and click on Actions and we get the same thing here. you can see I have already created what’s called a set. You do this by clicking on these four buttons up here, click on New Set and you can create your own set of actions.

To create a new action, click on the plus button. We can give our action a name – this is going to be Black Frame White Mount. We can also add it to this set or the default action set, but we are going to keep it in Coffee Break Photography. You can apply a function key, so let’s apply this to say F7, and we are going to press the shift and command to apply this action. If you want, you can apply a colour to the action so on the action panel it’s going to look a separate colour, so lets give it a nice green colour and lets click on record.

OK, so we now need to do the exact same things as last time. So, this time I’ll use the shortcut keys, option, command and C. We’re going to change the unit to percent. The width to 15, the width and height. We’re going to change the extension colour back to white. Click on OK. Then apply the same thing again. Percent, make it five on the width and the height and it’s going to be black. Click on OK.

Applying an action

So, that’s the action we want to repeat over and over again. All we need to do now is stop the action being recorded.  And we now have our actions over here.

I’m just going to press Command and Z a couple of times to take me back to the original image, just to show you now two ways of applying the action to the photograph. You can either go to the actions tab. Click on the action you want and press the play button and it applies it in just one click.

Let’s step back one more time. We set up our action to do that which was going to be Command, Shift and F7, and it also applies that same action to it.

So there we have it, a very easy way to create a mount and a frame around an existing image.

That was just a quick Espresso Coffee Break Photography fix this time. If you have a photography-related question that you’d like me to help you with, send an email to contact@edinburghphotographyworkshop.com.

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See you next time on Coffee Break Photography.

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