Written by Steve Patterson. In this Photoshop photo effects tutorial, we'll learn how to create a simple snowflakes photo border, which can be a fun finishing touch for photos of family and friends during the holidays or of any snowy winter scene. 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

Photoshop ships with a ready-made snowflake brush that we could use for our effect, but its default size is a little too small for our purposes here, and increasing a brush beyond its default size makes it look soft and dull. Since we want everything to look nice and sharp, we'll quickly create our own, larger snowflake brush using one of Photoshop's built-in custom shapes (if you've already completed our Holiday Photo Border tutorial, you may already have a custom snowflake brush ready to use, in which case you can skip to Step 8).

First, we'll need a document to create the brush in, 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, and make sure the Background Contents option is set to White, then click OK to exit 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

Select the Custom Shape Tool from Photoshop's Tools panel. By default, it's nested 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

Not only does Photoshop ship with a ready-made snowflake brush, it also ships with a few snowflake custom shapes that we can choose from. We just need to load in the set that contains these shapes. To do that, with the Custom Shape Tool selected, right-click (Win) / Control-click (Mac) anywhere inside the new document to quickly access the Shape Picker, then click on the small arrow in the top right corner:

Clicking on the arrow opens a menu with lots of additional shape sets ready to be loaded in to Photoshop. The one we're looking for is the Nature set. Click on it to select it:

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 One Of The Snowflake Shapes

Scroll through the list of thumbnails until you see the snowflake shapes (there's three of them in a row). If you have Tool Tips enabled in Photoshop's Preferences, the name of each shape will appear when you hover your mouse over its thumbnail. We only need one of the snowflake shapes for our photo border, so pick your favorite of the three by clicking on its thumbnail to select it, then press Enter (Win) / Return (Mac) to close out of the Shape Picker. I'm going to choose the first snowflake (the one on the left):

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. Since we're going to create a brush out of the snowflake shape, and 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: Drag Out A Snowflake

Make sure your Foreground color is set to black by pressing the letter D on your keyboard, which resets Photoshop's Foreground and Background colors to their defaults (black is the default Foreground color). Then, click near the top left corner inside the document, hold down your Shift key, then drag out a snowflake shape. Holding down the Shift key as you drag constrains the aspect ratio of the shape so it doesn't look distorted. If you need to reposition the shape as you're drawing it, hold down your spacebar, move the shape into position with your mouse, then release your spacebar and continue dragging:

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Step 7: Create A Brush From The Shape

Go up to the Edit menu at the top of the screen and choose Define Brush Preset:

Name the new brush "Snowflake" when the Brush Name dialog box appears, then click OK to close out of it. You can also close out of the snowflake shape's document window at this point since we no longer need it (there's no need to save it if Photoshop asks):

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