Coming out of the frame

**brucep** · 10-24-2008, 02:45 PM

I don't often do "frames," but I did this one for fun and I'm having a 12"x12" version of it printed to frame.

I just got a call from the lab that printed it... they got quite a kick out of it.

C&C welcome as always.

**Landis** · 10-24-2008, 02:50 PM

Great job, Bruce. At least you won't have to matte the print!!!

**brucep** · 10-24-2008, 02:52 PM

You're right, Landis. I had to buy a "shadow box" frame which doesn't require a mat but keeps a space between the print and the glass. That little "smudge" in the lower left on the mat is a scan of my pencil lettered, "Harvest 2007 - Bruce Philpott."

**Landis** · 10-24-2008, 03:16 PM

Bruce, you should see the fun Vineyards and Wineries we saw in Italy. What fun we had. We could hardly get back on the bus after a few stops.

**Delvcaem** · 10-24-2008, 04:28 PM

Bruce, if I've ever seen a picture that required that out of frame technique, that is it.

It looks great.

**PPPhoto** · 10-24-2008, 05:17 PM

That's neat Bruce, it really gives it a 3-D effect.

Now the silly question - what are your steps for creating this effect?

I've seen it done many times, and I've even tried a few (very few). I'm just not sure if my methods are the most efficient, and I would be interested in learning a bit more, and perhaps trying it again, and with more images.

Perhaps a Knowledge Base article on this would be handy. I didn't find anything when I used the search tool.

**marshall2** · 10-24-2008, 07:21 PM

Very cool Bruce, it really does look like the grapes are coming out of the picture. Great job!

**brucep** · 10-24-2008, 07:49 PM

I just got home with the print. The lab has made one for themselves and are going to frame it in a deep-ish frame (to give an "excuse" for the shadow top and left) and display it in their customer area. That's two of mine they'll have on display (with lots of others). The grapes are life-size!

The original image can be seen here: http://www.photozo.com/album/showpho...72&ppuser=8736

Originally Posted by PPPhoto

What are your steps for creating this effect?

I don't like to delete any parts of my image, so I used a layer mask to hide the parts of the image which would appear to be behind the mat. Beneath that layer I had a white background which would appear to be the mat.

I made a new layer above my harvest photo layer. Since I'd had to select those grapes so carefully to make my mask, I just Control(Command)-clicked the mask and that gave me that selection once again. On my new layer (let's call it grape shadow) I filled the selection with black and de-selected (Control-d). I erased the areas of this black that wouldn't appear to be out of the mat (leaving just the hard "shadow" of the grape cluster on a layer above the image of the cluster). I lowered its Opacity so I could see through it, and I dragged the hard, black shadow into a likely position and applied a Gaussian blur to it. Then I pressed Shift-Control-d to re-select the area where the grapes are and pressed Backspace (delete) to remove the shadow from on top of the grapes. Now the shadow appears to be being cast by the grapes! I reduced the opacity of this layer until it looked the way I wanted it to.

Similarly, I made an L-shaped selection which would become the top and left "frame" shadows (I temporarily increased my canvas size to make that selection large enough) and filled it with black (on yet another layer). Then I pressed Control-F to apply the most recent filter I'd used (the same amount of Gauzzian blur) and I reduced the opacity of this layer to the same amount as the grape shadow layer. (Logical?) Then I cropped my image back to the mat size again.

The mat bevels were just narrow selections on separate layers (above the worker/grapes layer but below the grape shadow layer... the shadow also falls on the bevel) and I "mitered" their corners by selecting the 45 degree corner and deleting the overlap and masked out these "bevels" where the grapes were "protruding." Voila! A few minutes and I had my grapes hanging out of the mat! It probably took me longer to type this than to do it. Give it a try!

The fact that the worker is out of focus adds to the 3-D-ness, IMO. It's not a portrait of him, but a celebration of the grape harvest.

Thanks for your interest and comments!

(P.S. If I had just cut out the parts of the image which I masked out, I could've put the grape shadow on a layer below the worker/grapes layer... there are many ways to do anything in Photoshop.)