Written by Steve Patterson. In this Photoshop tutorial, we'll learn how to create a simple and fun holiday greeting card-style photo border! Photoshop ships with some great snowflake shapes that we can use in our design, and we'll convert them into brushes so we can add variety to our border with snowflakes of different sizes, angles and opacity levels! We'll use a layer mask to cut out the area where the photo will appear, and a layer style to add a thin border around the photo itself. We'll finish things off by adding some traditional "Happy Holidays" text along the bottom to give our photo border more of a greeting card look to it.

I'll be using Photoshop CS5 here, but any recent version of Photoshop will work. Here's what the final result will look like:

Let's get started!

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Step 1: Create A New Photoshop Document

Before we begin work on the photo border itself, let's start by creating some snowflake brushes to use in our design. We'll need a new Photoshop document, so go up to the File menu in the Menu Bar along the top of the screen and choose New:

This opens the New Document dialog box. Enter 200 pixels for both the Width and Height of the new document, and make sure the Background Contents option is set to White. Click OK when you're done to close out of the dialog box. A new 200x200 pixel document, filled with white, will appear on your screen:

Step 2: Select The Custom Shape Tool

Photoshop ships with a few ready-made snowflake shapes that we can use. To access them, select the Custom Shape Tool from the Tools panel. By default, it's hiding behind the Rectangle Tool, so click on the Rectangle Tool and hold your mouse button down for a second or two until a fly-out menu appears, then select the Custom Shape Tool from the list:

Step 3: Load The Nature Shape Set

With the Custom Shape Tool selected, right-click (Win) / Control-click (Mac) anywhere inside the document window to quickly access the Shape Picker, then click on the small arrow in the top right corner of it:

Clicking on the arrow opens a menu with various options, along with a list of additional shape sets that we can load into Photoshop. Click on the Nature shape set to select it, which is the set that contains the snowflakes:

Photoshop will ask if you want to replace the current shapes with the Nature shapes or if you'd rather just append them to the list, which will add them below the original shapes. Click the Append button:

Step 4: Select The First Snowflake Shape

With the Nature shapes now loaded, scroll down through the small shape thumbnails until you see the snowflakes (there's three of them in a row). Click on the first snowflake's thumbnail (the one on the left) to select it. If you have Tool Tips enabled in Photoshop's Preferences, you'll see the shape's name, "Snowflake 1", appear when you hover your mouse over the thumbnail. Once you've selected the snowflake shape, press Enter (Win) / Return (Mac) to close out of the Shape Picker:

Step 5: Select The Fill Pixels Option

Photoshop gives us three different types of shapes that we can draw - vector shapes, paths and pixel-based shapes. We can switch between the types by selecting them in the Options Bar. We're going to be creating brushes out of the snowflake shapes, and since brushes are made of pixels, we'll draw pixel-based shapes. Click on the Fill Pixels icon in the Options Bar (the one on the right) to select it:

Step 6: Draw A Snowflake

When creating a brush in Photoshop, black areas in the document become the brush itself while white areas become transparent, which means that even though snowflakes are usually white (and they'll be white in our photo border later on), we'll need to draw a black snowflake against our white background if we want to create a brush from it. Press the letter D on your keyboard to quickly reset Photoshop's Foreground and Background colors to their defaults, which sets the Foreground color to black. Then, click in the center of the document and, with your mouse button still held down, begin dragging outward to draw the snowflake shape.

As soon as you begin dragging, hold down Shift+Alt (Win) / Shift+Option (Mac), then continue dragging. Make sure you wait until after you've started dragging before holding down these keys (if you see your cursor temporarily switch to the Eyedropper Tool, it's because you held the keys down too early). Holding the Shift key down will constrain the dimensions of the snowflake so it doesn't end up looking tall and thin or short and fat, while the Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) key tells Photoshop to drag the shape out from its center. Drag out the largest snowflake you can fit inside the document window, then release your mouse button, then the keys (once again, make sure you release the keys after you release your mouse button). If you need to reposition the snowflake as you're drawing it, hold down your spacebar, drag the shape around inside the document, then release the spacebar and continue:

Step 7: Create A Brush From The Snowflake

With the first snowflake in place, go up to the Edit menu at the top of the screen and choose Define Brush Preset:

Name the new brush "Snowflake 1" in the Brush Name dialog box, then click OK to exit out of the dialog box:

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Step 8: Create Brushes From The Other Two Snowflake Shapes

And with that, our first snowflake brush has been created! We still need to make brushes out of the other two snowflake shapes, so first, press Ctrl+Z (Win) / Command+Z (Mac) to undo the snowflake we just drew in the document window. You should see only the solid white background. Then repeat Steps 4 - 7 for each of the other two snowflake shapes. Right-click (Win) / Control-click (Mac) inside the document window to bring up the Shape Picker and click on the next snowflake's thumbnail to select it. Make sure the Fill Pixels option is selected in the Options Bar. Click in the center of the document and begin dragging out the snowflake shape, then hold down Shift+Alt (Win) / Shift+Option (Mac) and continue dragging out the largest snowflake that will fit inside the document. Go up to the Edit menu and choose Define Brush Preset, then name the new brush either "Snowflake 2" or "Snowflake 3" depending on which one you're creating. Remember to press Ctrl+Z (Win) / Command+Z (Mac) after you've created the "Snowflake 2" brush to clear it from the document before drawing the third snowflake shape.

Once you've created the third snowflake brush, you can close out of the document window since we no longer need it. Our snowflake brushes are now ready to go. We'll be creating a brand new Photoshop document for our holiday photo border next.

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