Present your PICTURES like a pro

Make the most of your shots by serving them up with your own custom-made presentation template, using Type and Transform tools in Photoshop

This may sound like a bold claim, but this technique really will

improve any picture. From a hurried family snap to a carefullyconsidered still-life, and from a shaky scenic to a delicate, moonlit landscape, this simple project will elevate a photo’s status and place it in an entirely new league. No matter what your style of photography may be, and regardless of whether you’re a raw beginner or an old hand, this will lift your shots onto a higher plane, and give them a commercial, high-end look that demands attention.

When you carefully frame and label an image, your viewer will immediately assign it more value. It’s an automatic response on their part: regardless of the picture’s actual content, it’ll suddenly take on greater importance and become more compelling. Presenting a photo in the right way shows you’re serious and committed to your photography, and it makes your pictures appear better than they really are. Fire off a badly composed, slightly soft portrait, and your viewers will move on quickly. But present the same shot in an attractive, elegant way, and it’ll take on a new meaning in their eyes.

That’s not to say that this technique is for making less-deserving pictures look better: it’s to make your good shots look fantastic. It may feel a little utilitarian compared with more creative projects, but nothing will make a bigger difference to the way your photos are perceived.

Create a new document

Go to File > New and choose the paper size you want to use. This will usually be governed by your inkjet printer, but you can go for any size if you’re using an online lab. Here, we’ll go for the common A4 size (297 x 210mm at 300ppi), so select this preset. On the right, choose the landscape orientation, along with RGB Color, 8 bit, and White. Click Create. Press Ctrl/Cmd+R to display Rulers, and zoom into the top-left corner. Click the ruler on the left and drag out a guide to the 1.5cm mark. Drag another guide from the top ruler and position it 1.5cm down. Hold the space bar and scroll over to the top-right, and drag out another guide to 1.5cm from the right edge (the 28.2cm mark). Drag a fourth guide down from the top to the 18cm mark, (3cm from the bottom).

Create the image template

Select the Rectangular Marquee tool from the Toolbox, and drag out a selection to cover the frame. It’ll snap to the guides and leave you with marching ants around the frame. Press D to reset your colours to black and white, then press Alt+Backspace to fill the selection with black. Open the Layers panel (Window > Layers), and create a new layer by pressing Ctrl/Cmd+Alt+Shift+N. Your selection will still be on screen, so go to Edit > Stroke. In the dialog box, set Width to 10px, Color to Black, and Location to Inside. Click OK, and a thin, crisp keyline will be placed on your new layer. In the Layers panel, double-click where it says Layer 1 and rename the layer as ‘Keyline’.

Add a working title

Press Ctrl/Cmd+D to get rid of the marching ants, and drag another guide out from the left margin. As you get towards the middle of the document, allow it to snap in place, right in the centre. Select the Type tool, and in the Options bar at the top of the screen, click on the ‘centre text’ icon. Now click directly under the image frame on the centre line. Open the Character panel (Window > Character). You can use any font style you like, but to get started, choose Arial and go for a Size of 24pt. In the tracking (the shaded VA box on the right), input an amount of 380; below this, select the All Caps (TT) option, and Type in a working title, such as ‘Your Title In Here’.

Add your photographer’s credit

Click on the Move tool to set down the text, then select the Type tool again. Click just underneath the image frame on the right-hand side. With Arial still selected in the Character panel, set the font size to 10pt and change the tracking amount to zero. Type your photographer’s credit, such as ‘Photography By Your Name’. If you don’t want your credit in upper case, click the TT icon to disable the function. If you want to use a © symbol in your credit, for example to put ‘Photography © Your Name 2017’, it can be entered by pressing Alt+G on a Mac or Alt+0169 on a Windows PC. Once you’ve keyed in the text, move the cursor below the words and you’ll be able to move them so they’re lined up with the guide line.

Save your template

With your template created, click on the Background layer to make it active, then go to File > Save As and save it in the Photoshop (PSD) format. Call it something suitable such as ‘A4 Frame Landscape’. You can now load this whenever you want to present an image without going through the previous steps.

To get your image into the template, go to File > Open, and load the image you want to display. It will open into its own window. Go to Select > All, then Edit > Copy then File > Close. You’ll return to your template. Check that the Background layer is active, and go to Edit > Paste. The image will be placed over the template.

Resize your image to fit

In the Layers panel, your picture will be the active layer. To see it appear within the frame, click where it says Normal and change the Blend Mode to Screen. Your picture is likely to be too big for the frame; to scale it down, press Ctrl/Cmd+T to enter Free Transform mode, and you’ll see a bounding box around the image. It may disappear off the screen, so zoom back with Ctrl/Cmd+minus until you can see it. To scale it down, hold Shift to keep it in proportion, and drag the corner handles inwards until it’s neatly arranged. You can rotate the image by dragging outside the bounding box, and fine-tune the placement with the arrow keys. When you’re happy, press Return.