Photoshop Tutorial: How to Create a Rustic Border
Photoshop is an extremely diverse program that allows you to do many different things within it. You can use Photoshop to edit pictures, create logos and web graphics, and even create complete pictures from scratch. Many people use Photoshop to edit pictures and photography. Both amateurs and professional photographers alike use Photoshop for the same reason. Even if you're a beginner to Photoshop, there are many different ways to learn how to use the program. There are two main ways to learn Photoshop though, by trial and error, and ultimately experimenting with all the different tools, and through tutorials. Because there are so many things you can do in Photoshop, tutorials work extremely well if you just search for what you want to do.
Since Photoshop is mainly used to edit pictures, I will show you a really cool way to edit pictures in the program, and that is by adding a rustic border. A rustic border is different than a regular border because it has sort of a grungy, vintage effect to it. There are other borders you can add to your pictures, but I will just show you an example of one border (the rustic border) in this Photoshop tutorial.
Before we begin, make sure you have a picture you want to work with. You want to make sure it is a picture that would look good with a rustic border, but for the sake of this tutorial, you can use any picture you want. If you don't have your own picture, you can use one off morguefile.com or sxc.hu. Both are free picture websites that you can search for any picture you want.
So let's begin!
Step 1) Open up your picture in Photoshop by going to File > Open and searching for the file like you would any document. If you're copying and pasting off the Internet, go to File > New instead. The canvas size will automatically adjust to the size of the picture on your clipboard. After the blank canvas is open in the program, go to Edit > Paste.
Step 2) Open a new blank canvas that is the same size as your picture by going to File > New and adjusting the pixel sizes of both width and height.
Step 3) On the vertical menu bar, make sure the black and white color swatches are on the bottom with black on top. On the new blank document go to Filter > Render > Difference Clouds.
Step 4) Then go to Filter > Artistic > Palette Knife to apply the filter. Repeat this step only with the Filter > Artistic > Poster Edges.
Step 5) Now go to Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask and boost the sharpening by changing the Amount to 50 and the Radius to 1.0.
Step 6) After step 5, go to Filter > Distort > Glass.
Step 7) Save the image you just made and name it whatever you like by going to File > Save.
Step 8) Next, open up another blank canvas of the same size and create a border by going to Select > Select all, then Edit > Stroke and 25 pixels on the inside.
Step 9) Then go to Filter > Distort > Displace and select the scales and 10. When the open file box comes up, find your first image to displace it with. As soon as you do this step, you'll automatically see your rustic border.
Step 10) While the picture is still selected, go to Edit > Copy and paste it on your picture you want to apply the border to and click Edit > Paste.
Step 11) Change the Overlay of the new pasted layer to Darken and you'll now notice the border is around your image.
Step 12) To bring down the sharpness of the border, we'll use the Gaussian Blur. Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and set it to 0.3.
Then you're done!
