frames and mats

[jimh12345]

I need an easy way to add a realistic frame and mat to images in AP.   (Yes I know Publisher has a Frame tool but I don't have Publisher).   I'll need to do this often so I'm not interested in learning how to create them myself, with rectangles, 'emboss' etc.   I just want to slap a mat and frame on an image, for my photography web site.

I've seen posts from people saying you don't need AP for this, there are all sorts of free online tools that do it.  And I've been unable to find a single one that isn't either a scam or a complex mess like Canva.

This is one of those things that you'd think would be simple.... but apparently is not.

Any ideas out there? 

[thomaso]

If you are not interested in learning how to create them you can either choose from the few preset styles in the Styles panel, or place images with the desired content in your Affinity documents, possibly accessed via the Stock panel.

If you need to do this often you can save them as custom styles in the Styles panel or as objects in the Asset panel.

[carl123]

4 hours ago, jimh12345 said:

I need an easy way to add a realistic frame and mat to images in AP. 

That's pretty vague, do you have an example of the sort of "frame and mat" that you want for your image?

[jimh12345]

The "White Border" in Styles might be useful sometimes, but I don't see anything there that looks like a mat and frame.

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, jimh12345 said:

The "White Border" in Styles might be useful sometimes, but I don't see anything there that looks like a mat and frame.

Can you provide an example of what you do want?

Have you considered taking a picture of something that has the frame/mat you'd like, removing whatever image it may have in the middle, and inserting your artwork into it?

[thomaso]

1 hour ago, jimh12345 said:

I don't see anything there that looks like a mat and frame.

What is your idea of a mat and frame ?
(One reason they aren't ready-made in AP may be the extremely wide range of possibly desired looks, another they aren't difficult to create)

[jimh12345]

Ok here's an example.  A POD site which I use adds these automatically when people are shopping for print options.  I want to be able to do this for myself.  In this one the black frame has little or no texture, but some options would be nice. 

 

 

[David in Яuislip]

Unless you want an ornate frame like the Mona Lisa, use css
Adding frames to the images just bloats the file

moff.htm

[thomaso]

2 hours ago, jimh12345 said:

I want to be able to do this for myself.  In this one the black frame has little or no texture, but some options would be nice. 

If you don't want to learn how to create this there is no simple 1-click way in Affinity to achieve this look. If you learned it you could use Assets as a 1-click solution for further uses, also saved Styles might work. Since you mentioned in your initial post "rectangles, 'emboss' etc." I guess you know possible workflows already, right? Instead of "emboss" you could use "shadow" as effect … or a shape object + "blur" effect.

For the appearance of a texture you could use either a separate image (masked + blend mode) or a Procedural Texture. Since the latter needs to be typed like code and requires maths skills I assume you would prefer the other way. Affinity has no option like "assign texture", the subtle "Noise" effect in the Colours Panel excepted.

[firstdefence]

Considering the components that go into making a decent frame and Mat, I say learn, it's not rocket science.

8 x 10 frame and mat with textures: Frame and Mat.afphoto

 

[jimh12345]

I'm just a photographer, not a designer.  I  use AP mainly for the things I can't do in Capture One, via layers, adjustments, masks.  Going beyond that, learning more advanced stuff in AP, doesn't have much payoff for me. 

I guess I'm knocking on the wrong doors here.  There are phone apps that will slap a realistic frame on an image, but they look scammy.   Ditto for web sites that offer framing if you'll just "start your free trial' with a VISA number.  I'm still looking.

[v_kyr]

2 hours ago, jimh12345 said:

I'm just a photographer, not a designer.  I  use AP mainly for the things I can't do in Capture One, via layers, adjustments, masks.  Going beyond that, learning more advanced stuff in AP, doesn't have much payoff for me.

It's easy, you just need one template, which you then can resize to your needs and where you recolor those parts (frame + mate) of it you want to adapt. You place then your images in. - The frame part can of course also instead of applying some color (changing the color with the color picker), be assigned a style (wood, metal, plastic ... etc.) with some applied noise or textures here.

• frame_template.afphoto

 

• frame_sample.afphoto

See also ...

• Reusing filmstrips as photo borders

... for some related stuff.

[jimh12345]

13 hours ago, v_kyr said:

It's easy, you just need one template, which you then can resize to your needs and where you recolor those parts (frame + mate) of it you want to adapt. You place then your images in. - The frame part can of course also instead of applying some color (changing the color with the color picker), be assigned a style (wood, metal, plastic ... etc.) with some applied noise or textures here.

• frame_template.afphoto

 

• frame_sample.afphoto

See also ...

• Reusing filmstrips as photo borders

... for some related stuff.

Thanks, I'll fiddle with that.   As a mere photographer I don't know what a Rectangle or a Style "is", or what I can do with them, but it might be worthwhile for me to get into these things a little bit.

[v_kyr]

31 minutes ago, jimh12345 said:

I don't know what a Rectangle or a Style "is", or what I can do with them

Well as a photographer you should at least know what a rectangle shape is, as your cams viewer, display and sensor etc. all have/share internally a geometrical rectangle form. Take a look into the APh 2 Online help to get an idea what these things offer and how to make use of them.

• Rectangle Tool
• Styles
• Styles panel
• Using layer effects (fx inner/outer shadows)
• Quick FX panel
• Transform panel

What I've shown you above as a template, is entirely created out of just rectangle shapes (with the addition of a little bit added FX shadow for the mat rectangle part).

You just need to make/setup one time a reusable Frame/Mat template for yourself, the sizes and way you would like that initially to look like. Afterwards you can always reuse that one and adapt it optically (it's colorings etc.) so it meets different for your individual shots frame/mat colors. - Though you should maybe make yourself a horizontal/vertical (portrait & landscape format) template, or if you make just one, then copy and rotate that one 90° over as needed by your images.

 

[iconoclast]

For a simple Passepartout, you only need to drag a rectangle that fits to the edges of your image document. Then remove its Fill and give it a Stroke (Outline), as thick as you want. Very easy.

For squiggly frames, I would recommend to take a look into the Stock Panel or start a Google-Search for it.

[jimh12345]

3 hours ago, v_kyr said:

What I've shown you above as a template, is entirely created out of just rectangle shapes (with the addition of a little bit added FX shadow for the mat rectangle part).

And it works, mostly.  Here's my confusion:  each of those 3 layers is (to me) some sort of a vector object.  2 are Rectangles, one is a "Curves" (?).     But when I drop a photo on it and try to adjust it I see that it actually has a pixel size, 1600 x 1200.  I need it bigger.

So I resize the canvas to be larger than that "Frame", and now I can resize it to the size and aspect ratio I want.  So far so good.  But that frame is now within a larger "Canvas" which shows a white background. I want to crop the image to just the frame - in other words, 'snap' the crop to the Frame I've created.  And I can find no way to do that.  Sure I can drag the crop rectangle around and get pretty close to the exact edge of that frame, but what a pain. There has to be a better way.  

Here's what I have.  The frame is the dimensions I want, the photo is in it, but it's inside a larger document.  How can I crop it out precisely?  Isn't there some way to 'snap' the Crop to the contents of a layer?

[v_kyr]

41 minutes ago, jimh12345 said:

Here's my confusion:  each of those 3 layers is (to me) some sort of a vector object.  2 are Rectangles, one is a "Curves").

Yes one is "Curves" (vectors), as I used two rectangles a bigger and a smaller one, selected and geometrical subtracted these, in order to get the outer thinner black filled frame. - I show you here quickly via a screencast video, why those got curves (vectors) ...

 

I've used overall small sizes since that was meant more for demonstrating (demonstration purposes) how to do such a frame, also what I've shown in the above template examples is kept small in size. - You have to setup those instead the (huger) sizes you need, so creating a document with the pixel dimensions (width, height) and using rectangle sizes (width, height) to fit there on, you need instead. This depends overall on the common bitmap image sizes you usually want to place (mount) in there into such a frame. - Thus you may have to customize and enlarge all (either the whole frame group, and/or possibly the single frame and mat layers in the document via the transform panel).

Also I didn't cropped my example image, what I did instead is, I opened it in APh (in a seperate doc window tab) then selected it's background labeled layer and copied it. Then I switched over to the example template document and pasted the copied layer in. Next I selected the just pasted in bitmap image/pixel layer and in the transform panel I've reduced it's height/width sizes, so it get's smaller and fits into my smaller setup image place region. - All in all I just did this here ...

Hope that helps?

 

 

[v_kyr]

1 hour ago, jimh12345 said:

Here's what I have.  The frame is the dimensions I want, the photo is in it, but it's inside a larger document.  How can I crop it out precisely?  Isn't there some way to 'snap' the Crop to the contents of a layer?

There are several ways to do so, either via the Crop tool and by typing in the exact dimensions (width, height) you want to have ...

... or by creating a new document with the exact dimensions (height/width) of your overall outer black frame dimensions/size. Select therefor the Group/Frame and inspect in the transforms panel it's dimensions (width/height). Then create a new document with those dimensions ...

... and copy/paste the whole selected layers (Group/Frame with the image inside) over into that new created document, then save all.

Another possibility is to resize the canvas of the document ("Document -> Resize Canvas...") to the width/height values of just the Frame/Group, which should shrink the canvas size then accordingly.

For example: my above shown example template has just ...

• Document size is:  w x h = 1200 x 1600 px
• The Frame + Mat Group is:  w x h = 1200 x 1600 px   <-- (can be inspected and setup/altered in the transforms panel)

 

[jimh12345]

Problem is that after I'd tweaked the frame it was no longer centered in the 'canvas' so resizing wouldn't have worked.   Seems like there should be a way the Crop tool could 'snap' to that rectangle, but none of the Snap tool options had any effect. 

So I cropped it manually and that's ok, but this is far from a one-click solution so I'm still looking for an application or web site that generates frames automatically.

[thomaso]

6 hours ago, jimh12345 said:

But that frame is now within a larger "Canvas" which shows a white background. I want to crop the image to just the frame - in other words, 'snap' the crop to the Frame I've created. 

1 hour ago, jimh12345 said:

Seems like there should be a way the Crop tool could 'snap' to that rectangle, but none of the Snap tool options had any effect.

Yes, an option to crop the document dimension to a selected layer (or pixel selection) is still missing. – Instead using the Crop Tool you could either/or …

a. Choose menu Document > Clip Canvas.
b. Select all (parent) layers > Copy > menu File > New From Clipboard.

With b. the initial document (a) will remain unchanged + a new file will be created with the exact dimensions – but unfortunately with 96 dpi, regardless of the initial document resolution (which may require to get reset according to your needs). (in V1, don't know about V2)

[thomaso]

A more simple setup uses just two rectangles. The frame width is achieved by a Stroke only (no fill, no subtracted object), thus its width can get defined any time with 1 value (or the slider interface). The mat rectangle has the shadow effect as "inner shadow" assigned, its layer is a bit larger than the 'hole' in the 'frame'. In this example the 'photo' layer got additionally a thin black stroke assigned.

For the stroke of the 'frame' rectangle you have the option "Scale with object". If unticked it will maintain the width regardless of the 'frame' size, if activated it will scale according to a 'frame' resizing. Regardless of this option or a change in the frame's aspect ratio, the horizontal + vertical frame width (= stroke width) will be identical.

[v_kyr]

3 hours ago, jimh12345 said:

... but this is far from a one-click solution so I'm still looking for an application or web site that generates frames automatically.

Usually one could try to use Macros (record/replay macros) in order to automate such tasks, which do need more and always the same steps to be performed ...

... but APh is sadly pretty weak in terms of the recording capabilities and the overall offered functionality here. Especially when images have different sizes and orientations there is no real dynamic image processing handling possible. - So I personally won't recommend to hazzle at all around with macros.

 

 

 

[R C-R]

4 hours ago, jimh12345 said:

but this is far from a one-click solution...

Considering all the possible variations for frames & mats, how could there be a one click solution that always produced what you wanted?

After all, I have about 15 framed pictures on the walls here. They have at least 6 distinctly different frame treatments, & a variety of different mats, some with beveled edges, some flat & others textured, & so on.

[v_kyr]

Most clickey mickey online framing services offer just pretty kitschy frame things, so not that much of classic serious frames. A halfway usable online one is maybe ...

• https://www.fotor.com/photo-editor-app/editor/frames

However due to most of the online framing crap, I would always prefer to make my own created designs here!

And then there are desktop apps like AKVIS Frames etc., though I personally use my own made apps & python scripts here for such framming things instead.

[thomaso]

On 3/28/2023 at 9:36 PM, v_kyr said:

I used two rectangles a bigger and a smaller one, selected and geometrical subtracted these, in order to get the outer thinner black filled frame.

On 3/29/2023 at 4:50 AM, v_kyr said:

one could try to use Macros (record/replay macros) in order to automate such tasks,

Is there a reason / advantage to create the frame width two rectangles + subtract geometry? To me it appears more flexible and reliable to use just 1 rectangle with a stroke assigned. Your macro shows the disadvantage of the subtract method which does not maintain an equal frame width for its horizontal and vertical parts when it gets scaled: