A Mosaic Frame to share (digital)

One of my favorite things to do is to take actual objects from my home or elsewhere and turn them into digital elements that I can use for projects.  This frame is one that my sister-in-law has on her piano.  By taking a photo of the frame and cropping it with the custom shape cutter in my Creative Memories StoryBook Creator 3.0 software, I can save the image of the frame as a .png file that I can use over and over for digital pages and projects.

This is the photo of the frame that I used.  It is important to start with a clear sharp photo and to have good even light on the item.  Then you bring the full size image into a working file and carefully trace the shape with the custom cutting tool.  I usually make the photo very large to make it easier to see the edges.

First you need to "flatten" the photo so you can cut away the portions you don't want for your digital element. I drew a curved line around the inner portion of the frame and when I had it perfectly aligned (by editing the points) I erased the shaded area, removing the photo.  For this example, you could also use an oval shape cutter to remove the oval center of the photo frame.  Sometimes you can use the magic wand to help you select the area to cut away - this works best of there is a high contrast between two areas in the photo.

Here is the photo with the center of the frame removed.  I used the custom cutter again to define the points around the outside of the frame and eliminated all of the background.

Then I simply saved the remaining image of the frame as a .png file by right clicking and choosing "save as content" and saved the new frame directly in the program content manager.  (The image above is just a screen shot - you should download the full size file below).

Once you have saved the frame you can use it over and over again.  Just create an empty photo box behind the frame and you can drop in any photo.  I thought this photo was a cute one that was well-suited to the frame!

You can download this frame at the link below.

I hope you had a nice weekend - I got a few things done but I can't share the projects until later.  I have had requests for several videos and I will try to get those done this week.

Mosaic Frame

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