Photoshop Craft Tutorial: Wooden Photo Frame

Note: This is a guest blog post by Eli Burford, and its translation to spanish will be added shortly!

In this tutorial I would like for us to do some simple craft work in Photoshop.

Basically we will be taking a texture (photo) of some wood planks and bringing them into Photoshop to use as a wooden photo frame.

To follow through with this tutorial I would request that you have at least basic knowledge of Photoshop, but it is a fairly easy-to-achieve effect, so if you re-read certain parts I’m sure you’ll be able to complete it no problem.

If you need a hand with anything, please consider downloading the complete PSD file at the end of the tutorial, or leaving a comment down below with your question!

1. Getting Started

Let’s start by getting our wood textures. For this tutorial I went on over to CG Textures and downloaded two completely different plank textures: one, two. Save any of those two to your desktop.

Create a new document in Photoshop (anything that fits nicely in your screen resolution should do).

Now bring in one or two photos of a family member, or something that you treasure Thanks to my brother Joseph for allowing me to use these photos of my nephew and niece!

Since we will only be doing one at a time you should hide one of your photos. Center the photo you want to be working with.

2. Cut out Texture

Now, we need to cut out a few different planks. Open one of your texture images and use the polygonal lasso tool to select one.

After you have selected a piece, copy (CTRL/COMMAND+C) then paste it (CTRL/COMMAND+V) into your other document (containing the photo).

3. Moving/Rotating Texture

That doesn’t look quite right, so, hit CTRL/COMMAND+T to go into Transform Mode and resize (and rotate) your plank to fit one of your sides. I’ll be going: left, top, right, bottom.

Note: remember to name your layers so you don’t have trouble later on.

Repeat the cutting out of a plank and place it over your photo. Remember, all you have to do is:

1. Select a plank from your texture image.
2. Copy it, then paste it into your other document.
3. Resize/rotate it using Transform Mode (CTRL+T).

Remember: this is not rocket science. This is craft (in Photoshop!) Nothing has to be exact, nothing has to be straight. This is just a fun wood photo frame!

Who knows if what I have done is in the realm of possibility, however. I’m not sure they can be overlapping each other like that Oh well!

4. Simple Reflection

For a finishing touch, you may want to add a glass effect to the photo, for this, all you have to do is:

1. Create a new layer above your photo layer.
2. Select your photo’s pixels (hold CTRL and click on the photo layer’s thumbnail in the layer’s palette).
3. With the gradient tool, drag a white to black gradient inside of your selection.
4. Change the layer mode for this new layer to Screen and lower the opacity to something around 50-70%.
5. Repeat this once or twice.

Note: click above image for full-size.

5. Finishing Touches

OK, before doing this next step you should probably group all of your relevant layers and make a duplicate of the group. Merge your second group together and rotate it slightly, then add a soft Drop Shadow layer style to the final layer.

Finished

So yeah, that was a very easy tutorial, now you just need to try some different things. I finished by using the other planks texture with the other photo, and also added some extra little bits in to make a simple desktop wallpaper.

If you found a certain part of this tutorial difficult, please consider downloading the final PSD file for free (from MediaFire), or if that doesn’t work, please leave a comment below!

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed the tutorial! Don’t forget to subscribe to Gisele’s RSS feed for updates!

About the Author

My name is Eli Burford and I am a learning web designer and hobbyist Blogger. You can see some of my previous Blogs at PhotoshopStar or Design Blurb.