Photo Effects: Painted Edges Photo Border Effect

Step 7: Select The 111-pixel "Rough Flat Bristle" Brush

We're going to switch brushes now and touch up the edges to enhance the painted look. Once again, right-click (Win) / Command-click (Mac) anywhere inside the image to bring up the Brush options dialog box, scroll down to near the bottom of the list of available brushes, and this time, click on the 111-pixel brush directly below the one we just used, the Rough Flat Bristle brush:

Step 8: Paint Small Strokes Around The Edges To Enhance The Effect

With the new brush selected, and making sure the layer mask, not the layer itself, is still selected in the Layers palette, go around the edges and paint small strokes to add some specks and paint splatters, enhancing the effect. The trick here is to keep most of the brush inside the already painted area so only a small percentage of it is extending out beyond the edges. You don't want to overdo it here. Allow only a tiny bit of the brush to extend into the white area and paint with very short strokes. Even simply clicking an area once with the brush can be enough. Again, if you feel you made a mistake, press Ctrl+Z (Win) / Command+Z (Mac) to undo and try again. There's no pressure to get it right the first time, so feel free to experiment:

Our painted edges effect is complete! You could stop here if you wanted, but I'm going to take things further and make it look as if the photo was printed on canvas, and we're going to do it in a way that allows us to re-use this Photoshop file as a template for other photos with no repeat steps. We'll do that next.