[slejhamer]

My gals!

[adam]

lovely picture! and super border!!!

[Petographer]

So beautiful Mitch. The work you did and the girls. In regards to the processing, the sepia really catches my attention. Can you tell what steps you took to get this particular tone please?

[Don Schaeffer]

I really like the style of this. It gives a Victorian Alice in Wonderland impression outside the border and a modern impression inside. Good work.

[jericho]

Fantastic Mitch! If you are sharing secrets, I would LOVE to learn this border/processing technique.

[Toad]

Superb! ... and you know how I hate frames....

this is really grea t work, Mitch

[slejhamer]

Thanks very much for the nice comments!

I'm going to have this printed today.

I wasn't too sure about the frame - I had seen something similar in a photo magazine advertisement and wanted to emulate it. Then I kept switching back and forth between the "real" version and the framed version, and finally decided that the framed has a uniqueness that will catch the eye when it's displayed. In other words, I think it would be very "salable" ...

Not sure how I got that particular sepia tone. I started with the Photoshop "sepia toning layer" action that comes with the program, but found it too reddish brown for this image. I tweaked the hues (but didn't keep the adjustment layer separate in the .psd file - sorry!) and brightened it up a little, then added my soft-focus effect for diffusion.

The overall image is cropped to 8x10". I set the rectangular marquee to 5x4" dimensions, then using the rulers I placed my marquee on the sepia layer 1" down and stretching from 2" to 8" on the horizontal. Then I simply deleted that selection to create a hole in the sepia layer.

After that it was a simple matter of adding an outside stroke around the hole to get the white border and adding the drop shadow effect on the layer.

[shuttertalk]

Very nice work Mitch! I like the frame - it works sort of like a crop, but makes the cut out bits still visible. It does make it very salable indeed.

[shuttertalk]

By the way, happy Mother's Day, to all the mothers out there.