How To Decorate with Photoshop

We plan to use the hallway of our newly finished basement to show off vacation photos. The walls are about 12 feet on one side and 7 on the other. I've had trouble deciding how many frames to order and what color. Since the wood is all maple in the house I considered maple frames but I also thought black frames would look nice with photos.

So I turned to Photoshop to help me. First I photographed the hallway. Yes, that is the wall color!



Next I went to americanframe.com to get a framed photo. I have used American Frame many times for custom frames and have had great luck with then. Very inexpensive way to frame. The website has a neat ordering system where you can upload your artwork, then try out their frames so you can decide color as well as matting. Slick. After I picked out a frame I liked I simply did a screen snap into Photoshop as below.



In Photoshop I was able to position and copy the photos onto the wall. For those Photoshop users out there, I used the vanishing point tool to make sure they followed the perspective of the wall. Note that the farthest frame is smaller then the foremost. A slight emboss was added to give the frames their thickness and lastly a drop shadow behind to match the spotlight direction.



Here are the maple frames on the wall. It was pretty clear to me that the black frames were much better then the maple. The lighter wood on the green wall wasn't as striking.



As a final touch, just to see how realistic I could make it, I added some lighting to the otherwise flat black frames. Since the frames were added digitally they didn't get the same spotlight variation that the wall did. Not to mention the ambient green color bouncing off the other wall. The following images shows where the photos would be and the lighting that will fall on it. This was done by making a copy of the wall layer, masking out all but the frames then reducing the transparency of the new layer till there was a slight coloring on the frames. A very subtle effect but one that the eye would notice.



Here is the final composite. Note that the light and coloring on the frames is now more accurate.



Below is the Photoshop layers of the project. Each group was a different framing consideration.

My Web Anniversary

Today I had to check to see when a few DVDs from Amazon order would arrive. They make it very easy to do. The information is all very accessible and always a breeze to use. I love Amazon but I had no I idea just how long my love affair has been.

I found an area of my account that had a record of every purchase I've made. Curiosity sent me to the very first purchase which amazingly was 10 years ago today, March 19, 2008. What are the odds of finding that when I did!!



According to the order I bought a book on Sumo. But my memory is that the first thing I bought was a CD. More then likely this database was created around 1998. Amazon was founded in 1994 and went public the next year.