All Things Photo - Tips

Hi all. I thought it might be helpful for me to list a few tips and tricks for ways to best utilize my newest digital kit series, All Things Photo.

First, most of the frames are rectangle or square. So of course, cropping and re-sizing your photos to fit nicely underneath the frames will be the easiest.
For the shaped frames (typography and word frames), there are a few things you can to do change the shape of your photo to fit beneath the frame.

Using Photoshop:

• Open the photo first and make a copy of the background in a separate layer.
• Move the frame into it's own layer and move it on top of the photo. Re-size and move the frame as needed.
• Once you've got the frame where you want it, use the Magic Wand tool on the copied background layer and select everything outside of the frame. 
• When everything that you want deleted has been chosen, Inverse this (Select tab, Inverse), then Delete. 
• If you want to get really technical  you can delete parts of the photo that might be visible in the frame shadowing by using the Eraser tool on the copied background layer and just swipe along the shadow. 
• Crop the frame to the size that you'd like and then Merge the layers. 
• Save as a .jpeg or .png and move to your digital layout or project.

For PSE, there's some helpful information here and here.

A couple of other things to take note of. 

• The alphabet set (scheduled for release on April 25th, 2013) does not have a drop shadow on purpose. This is so you can line up the letter frames to create word mats. 
• These frames and mats are printable and great for other projects or to mat regular, framed pictures to hang on the wall.

I hope this helps. If you have any additional questions, please feel free to email me at kristindamon@gmail.com. If I don't have the answer, I'm sure we can figure it out together.  ~Kristin