I wanted to print some of my garden photos to put up in our home but I also wanted to do something a bit different; I didn’t want a straightforward mounted print. I also had a couple of white A3 size frames that I wanted to use but didn’t want to use mounts in them. So this is what I came up with:
For this I used an image taken in the spring of our cottage, then in Photoshop I created 2 layers: to produce the border the background layer was a full sized image that was lightened, slightly desaturated and slightly blurred. In the top layer was a smaller version of the same image with a few layer styles to give the bevelled edge and drop shadow.
This worked reasonably well and looks good in the white frame.
The second image is one I took in September of one of the gardens at East Ruston Old Vicarage:
For this image I processed it slightly differently. The background layer was done as above but the top layer was not reduced but cropped in place so that the detail blends across the join. This looks really good in the white frame on our lounge wall.
This method works better than the first print, so I started to rework the first but I had a problem: on the right lower corner is a wooden sculptured hare which is part of the composition. If I had applied the second method this would have been lost in the border area. So I kept the first version.