5 easy frame Tricks - Affinity Photo Tutorial

Key Takeaways

hello my friends how are you doing today our artistic journey brings us to five easy ways to create frames around your pictures my name is Olivia I'm a professional designer and I want to thank of her patrons who support me and make these videos possible thank you for that and let's get started so in my last tutorial I showed you a way to create a frame around a picture and some people were confused over the difference between the pixel kind of layer and the image kind of layer and this is also based on the workflow because I think a lot of you open up pictures right away and then edit them and this is where you when you open up an image the image appears as named background but the layer kind is pixel and the layer is also locked and so the difference is if you select your move tool and you select the layer there are not really any options up here and when you go to the image layer which you get when you place a file you get the fill you get the stroke you get all these kind of nice options up here also to answer this question before we go on what's my workflow well the reason why I almost never open an image directly it's because I don't know the pixel size I don't know the resolution I don't know the color form and it's using if I open it right away so what I am doing is that I create a new file so file new and there I can set up everything I need you can see here the color profile the color format the pixel dimensions the resolution all the things that I need and I know them from the start so I create this new file and then if I need a picture inside of that canvas I go to file and place and I simply select the picture and put it in there so as soon as real quick boom and there we have the picture and you can see that now this is the layer style image and it also has the original file name in here so can actually delete this one which is the other one okay cool so the way this will turn also into a pixel layer is if I rasterize it so let's have a look at that right-click rasterize you can see now it's turned into a pixel layer just like our background layer so let's resize this real quick to show you how to create a frame around that in an easy way again this is now a pixel layer so you don't have the choices up here with the outline so what you're doing instead is take the rectangle tool and make a rectangle over all of the image and if it doesn't snap to it click on the image and then click back to the shape and now it will snap to the outsides if it doesn't snap at all by the way go up here to view and then - whoops and then - snapping manager and make sure that snapping is enabled and you have here a lot of different choices check if the kind of snapping you need is enabled with this little hook here okay cool so let's go back here and now we have the rectangle as the same size as the image so what we gonna do next is again select the move tool select your rectangle and up here you have now the fill for the rectangle which is the fill color click on that and click on the little little circle here with the red line through it that means no fill so now it's invisible and now we go over to stroke and here you can set up any color you want I'm gonna use white in this case and now the next thing we want to do is to set up the line thickness so you can see here I can set up any kind of line I want it goes in this case up to 100 but you can enter a number that's higher than that by hand so let's say 150 and you can have that press enter and now it's 150 okay so let's go back to 100 in this case another thing you can see here is that you have a certain alignment alignment means - in what way does this line up to the border of our rectangle so in this case as you can see the blue line is in the center between the outside and the inside of this white line which you can see here by alignment Center so the next one you have is inside so this is inside and then you can also have outside so the alignment is outside around the blue line so this depends on where do you want to have to frame how do you want the frame to behave now you can also see that the corner is round in this case you find here the joint which you have the possibility between a round joint which is this one then you have a bevel joint which is a flat one and then you also have the Mitter joint and this is a pointy one okay you have by the way more options write in the comments if you want to see the other options that you have for these kind of corners because there's a lot of them I don't want to use them in this picture just to give you a little heads up over here you have more corner choices concave cut out straight around it and for rounded you can also set up like the radio stuff like that and also what you're seeing here is that this is not creating a mask you would have to mask the edges of the image separately from the outside of your frame basically okay good let's set this up to none again so we have our pointed edge one more thing I want to point out here is you can set up scale with object that might be useful if you want to scale it a lot or not designed it on the final size so you can click on that and then what you can do is select both of these layers so the rectangle layer click the rectangle layer and then hold shift and click the other layer for the image so both are blue and then press ctrl + G on your keyboard this creates a group and now you can resize them and as you can see because I have clicked scale with object this does also resize so that's a very easy way to do that okay cool before I go on it works exactly the same way with the background the only difference is that you would make a rectangle over all of the background naturally you can see like this and then set up the stroke just like what I was saying of course if it's now on outside you can't see anything because it's beyond the edge of you canvas so you have to set it either to inside or to align with your vole this is really big with the edge of your image to see the frame all right okay so let's delete that real quick okay a second way I want to show you uses almost the same technique but this will use the outline as a mask for another picture so you can have a colorful frame if you want to for this purpose I'm going to place another picture on my canvas so let's go to file place and let's select this very colorful image here I will rotate that real quick like this okay cool so now that we have this you can see this is just an image layer I will put this on top like that and then I will take the rectangle out of the group like this and in this case what I'm going to do is I'm clicking on my colorful picture just the colorful picture by the way in this case and I'm going to press ctrl G again so only the picture is inside of the group and then I'm clicking on the rectangle which is basically creating my frame right click and say mask to below and this will create a mask out of the outline so you can see now we have this kind of colorful line here and the reason why I made a group before that is because now I can still move the picture around if I want to inside a kind of interesting way where I want to place that I can resize it everything I want so I can have a really nice and colorful frame around my picture which can be cool effect if you want to have that and as you can see it is super easy to have that and you can even put this still in a with the image so we can still like we have this other image in a group I hope this is not getting confusing right now so we have the other image here in a group let's pull this out we can delete that group so you can see here this is our image this is the image that we are using for the colorful frame in a separate group and this is our rectangle that we use as a mask so now I close the group I select the group and I also select the pixel layer with my image that's inside of the frame and again I press ctrl-g so this is creating the group with everything inside and now technically I should be able to yeah you see I can simply resize that and rotate that and everything is coming with it no problem there okay cool so this is the second way on how to create an easy frame and this kind more fancy more colorful you can do whatever you want with that okay good so another thing that was pointed out in the comments is that I was asked why are you not using the strokes so let's delete this real quick why aren't you using the for the layer effects which we have over here you can see there is there's an outline here and you can also set that to white or any kind of color you want and you can set a radius and this is also creating a frame and maybe that's easier but there is a big problem with that the big problem with that is the outline you can't control the corners that is a big problem but it also has a benefit so you might think about do I want to do it do I not want to do it so what's the benefit here first of all it's quick it's easy it's hassle-free and it follows the shape so that's also very nice but if you click here on this little cog wheel you get more options you can see here you have a blend mode and all that kind of stuff but the most important thing is first of all you also have alignment like I said you can't control the shape of the color this will be around but with the alignment if say you want to have it Center the radius is a little bit smaller and if you put it inside it's even a pointy edge but it's inside so this will cover up your image if you want to have a frame where you don't cover up anything of the image and you have to put it the alignment oops okay to the outside then the corner will be around so there's a little bit of a downside here but what you can do and this is the huge benefit that for some reason the other way cannot do with the line is that you can set the fill style to contour you can set both of them to gradient by the way I didn't say this about the other one you can make this a gradient if you want to but let's talk about contour for a minute contour means that this is following the shape of your frame and this can be very beneficial doesn't look too great right now let's change the color so you can click here on the gradient and then click on the red on the on the Left dot and let's set this up for example to a nice blue and the other one to a nice pink like that and now you have a colorful frame around that you can even reverse that if you want to and as you can see this is following the shape of our outline so this can be very beneficial if you want this kind of contour gradients as a frame for your picture and if you put it on the inside it's even getting to be pointy so there is some benefit to that but like I said the downside is you don't really have control over how around the edges or if it's rounded at all unless with the alignment okay so let's go to the next one and that one is to use a PNG so you have a picture frame which can also be nice let's turn off this outline here and then I go to file and place and on pages like pixabay for example you can find PNG files it's important that's a PNG file because that means that the center of the image is already cut out which when you look at it on the website you will see that there's a checkerboard inside of the area that's transparent and a PNG can have transparency otherwise you can of course use any kind of picture off a frame and just cut out the inside it should be rather easy because most frames are just rectangles so that shouldn't be much work to do and then you simply line this up with the outside of your image oh it's a little bit smaller like that and within seconds you have a picture frame in this case maybe it's a little bit hard to see mm-hmm I have to create a fill layer let's create a fill layer real quick so we can see what we're doing and you fill their opacity like that yeah that's a bit better okay cool so as you can see here we have our PNG in the background or on top actually with our image let's group this also ctrl G to group it and as you can see now we have a nice actual frame around our pictures this is a way you can do it too if you want to with any kind of PNG frame that you can find on the internet or a JPEG where you can just cut out the middle part or create a mask for the middle part so this is a really easy way to create fancy frames around your pictures okay so let's go to the last one and this is the one I have already shown in my last tutorial which is that you place the file so file place you use the image whoops it's behind the fill layer now and let's resize this to a smaller size and as you can see now this layer stylus image so that means I have these options up here and this is in my book the easiest way to do that so go to fill and set up your fill color like you would and the stroke no not sorry not the fill color the stroke color get up here set up you stroke color any kind of color you want and set the stroke thickness and again the alignment of the stroke and the joint which is the corner so this is I find the easiest way but for this you have to place the image inside of the canvas so the layer type is image and not pixel that's important to know okay so these are the five easy ways to create frames around your images I hope this was a fun tutorial like it share it if you can because this is really helpful to my channel maybe click this little bell if you subscribe to my channel so you get notified every time I upload a new video thank you very much for watching see you in the next episode bye