Neg Style Keyline Borders

[CJP6008]

Dear All,

Does anyone have an action for putting a keyline border onto a print. I am not talking about fiddling about with canvas size, background colour etc. rather copying the look one gets from an oversized negative mask in the enlarger. I assume this would involve making a print with such a border in the darkroom, scanning said print and then somehow removing the image, leaving just that attractive uneven border. From there I assume some sort of cleverness with layers is required to use it as a layer that can be dropped onto other images as desired.

Any hints, tips, workflows, actions you have would be much appreciated. I am sure I could work it out but frankly life is too short and there seems little sense reinventing the wheel etc!

Thanks in anticipation,

Chris

[Pistach]

If I understand your perposes well, this is something that came to my mind too. Someday I will try. It is much like a background redo, which is often the main purpose of my work with PS (I have a minimalist ideology that the less PS does on my images the better). You might do an inverted cropping of the center part of the mask and use your photo as a bottom layer and the resulting frame as an upper layer. Perhaps I would experiment with enlarging a bit the frame is search of the best effect. When satisfied I would save the images separately before merging the layers
Hope will help
Regards
Pistach

[T_om]

Try here: http://atncentral.com/download.htm#Frames

Tom