How to Make Metal Borders in CS3

Make metal borders in Photoshop CS3 by filling rectangular selection regions created with the "Rectangular marquee" tool, with gradients from the "Gradient fill" tool. Gradient fills simulate the real-world lighting effects of many different objects, especially those with simple shapes like cylinders and spheres. The gradient fill you'll apply in this project shows a single progression from black to white, but you can create as many such progressions as you'd like to potentially achieve more realistic lighting effects for metals. Use the "Image" menu's "Curves" command to create these progressions.

Instructions

1. Click the "File" menu's "Open" command, then navigate to and double click a photo to which you'd like to add metal borders. Photoshop will load the photo.

2. Click the page icon on the "Layers" panel to create a new painting layer, then click the "Tools" panel icon shaped like a rectangle with a dashed line to run the "Rectangular marquee" tool for selecting rectangular regions.

3. Drag your cursor around the lowest quarter of the screen to select that area, then click the "Tools" panel icon shaped like a rectangle with many shades of gray that smoothly blend together. This action runs the "Gradient fill" tool. Press "D" to restore Photoshop's default colors of black for the foreground and white for the background. The "Gradient fill" tool uses these colors to do the fill.

4. Click the second leftmost drop-down control above the canvas to open the gallery of swatches for "Gradient fill." Click the button at the top right corner of the gallery to display a categorized list of gradient swatches, and then click the "Metals" category to load its swatches into the gallery.

5. Hover your mouse over the gallery's new swatches until the pop-up text displays "Steel," then click the mouse to select that swatch. Click the mouse just above the rectangular selection you made, and then drag directly down to a point close below the selection's bottom edge. Release the mouse to fill the selection with a gradient that smoothly changes from black to white using shades of gray. The effect is that of a metal bar.

6. Create metal borders for the leftmost and rightmost and top quarters of the canvas to complete your picture's full set of metal borders.

Resources

• Photoshop CS3 Bible; Laurie Ulrich; 2007