How to create a border breakout effect in Photoshop tutorial

How to create a border breakout effect in Photoshop
A border breakout effect is an cool way of bringing your photographs to life. Make your images appear to pop right out of the image. This is a fun tutorial that will show you in easy to follow steps how to create a border breakout effect using the very popular Adobe Photoshop. For this tutorial we will be working with a photograph I had taken at the late Steve Irwin’s Zoo. (Australia Zoo)

Step 1:
Open your photograph that you will be working with for this tutorial. 

Step 2:
First we need to make a selection using the rectangular marquee tool. The tool can be selected by pressing the M key on your keyboard. Grab and drag a selection over your image as pictured below.

Step 3:
We now to give the border we are making some depth perception. To do this click on (select<transform selection) in the top toolbar. You will notice that the selection will now have handles around it instead of running ants. While you hold down the (shift+CTRL+ALT) keys on your keyboard grab one of the top corners and drag it inward slightly. You will see from the image below that you now have some perception to the border we are creating.

Step 4:
Before continuing we have to rotate our selection and move it into the right position over the image. When you hover your mouse over the top right hand corner you will notice that the arrows indicate that you can turn the selection. Go ahead and turn your selection to the left. You can now click anywhere in the selection to move it into place over your image. When you are done you can go ahead and accept the selection.

Step 5:
We need to now put our selection on it’s own layers and to do that all you need to do is press (CTRL + J) on your keyboard. 

Step 6:
We now want to put a frame around our selection. In your layers pallet click on the little eye to turn off the background layer so we can only see layer 1. While holding (CTRL) on your keyboard, click on the layer thumbnail in the layer 1 layer.

You will notice that it has made a selection around your image. Now in the top toobar select (edit<stroke). This will open the stroke dialogue box. For this tutorial we will use a width of 5px. The color you choose is totally up to you. I have used a really light green, almost white color. Under “location”, select (inside). We want our border to be on the inside of our selection. Then click OK.

You can now see that your image has a border around it. Now deselect the image by pressing (CTRL + D) on your keyboard.

Step 7:
With our background layer selected, use the lasso tool to trace around the area that is outside of the border. This will take some time to get it perfect. Take your time and try and select only the main image and non of the background. You will see in our image below I have only selected the part of the tortous that is outside of the frame.

Step 8:
After you have selected the part of the image which is outside the frame, press (CTRL + J) on your keyboard to put that selection on a new layer. We now need to click and drag layer 1 below layer 2 in our layers Before we go any further, click on the little eye in the layers pallet beside background to turn the background layer off and make sure that layer 1 and 2 are turned on. You will see that we are now getting that border breakout effect that we are after.

Step 9:
We will now add a drop shadow to make it look more realistic. We need to select both layer 1 and layer 2 in the layers pallet. To do this click on “layer 1″ and while holding the (CTRL) key down on your keyboard click on layer 2 in the layers pallet.

Now press (SHIFT+CTRL+ALT+E) on your keyboard. This will merge the two layers together onto a new layer of it’s own. Make sure that the background layer is turned off and layers 1, 2 and 3 are turned on and that layers  3 is selected.

We now need to select the image in layer 3. While holding the (CTRL) key down on your keyboard click on the layer 3 thumbnail. You will see that there are running ants around your entire image. On the left hand side toolbar make your foreground color black if it’s not already. Now press the (ALT+backspace) keys on your keyboard. This will fill the selection with black. 

In your layers pallet drop the opacity down to about 70-80. For my image I have dropped it down to 70%.

Now in the top toolbar, go to (edit<free transform) or press (CTRL+T) on your keyboard. While holding the CTRL key down you want to move and mold the shadow on your image to bring it down were it should be. When you are happy with were the shadow is press ENTER and then (CTRL+D) to deselect the image.

The last thing we need to do is to click and drag our layer 3 below layers 1 and 2 as pictured below. This will put our shadow under the image where it should be.

You may wish to finish your image off by giving it a background color. (CTRL+click on the create new layer icon) in the layers pallet. Choose a color from the left hand toolbar. Press (ALT+backspace) to fill in the background with your selected color.

That concludes our tutorial for creating a border breakout effect using Photoshop.