Photoshop – make Aero Vista glossy frame

This tutorial will show you how to easily make frame such as the one you now see in Windows Vista releases or the so-called “aero vista” style design. There are a several techniques for making these semi- transparent frames around the picture with rounded edges, I will show you the technique I use.

1. Start off by making a background. Since this will probably be a graphic for a website, and we want to stick with the web 2.0 standard, I suggest making a gradient bg, with slightly darker hue at the top, fading towards the middle, but do not make the hue dramatically different. Same colour only a tiny bit darker.
2. Take some picture you are going to put inside your Vista-like frame. We will go ahead with the style and use a photo of a leaf with some water drops on it, which I pulled from Photoshop Photo Stock website. This image is not free for commercial use so we only put it here for learning purposes. Take your picture, copy and paste it unto your gradient background. Make sure there are at least about 50 px of distance between the image and the edges, otherwise we will not see the frame properly.

3. Select the layer with the image, and go to Layer >> Layer style >> Stroke

…and add a wide white border to the image, as shown on the screenshot. You must select the mode “outside”, otherwise your border’s edges won’t be rounded. Also, they will only be rounded if the border is thick enough, i.e. you won’t see much of the rounded effect on stroke settings below 5px.

4. Duplicate the image with white border layer. Select the upper layer and go to Filter >> Blur >> Gaussian Blur. Apply the blur settings and shown on the enclosed screenshot. Roughly speaking, the more blur you add, the wider will be your semi- transparent frame later. Ideally keep it approximately as wide as the white border, this way the proportion will be reserved; otherwise having a too think white border or a too wide transparent frame will not look organic.

5. Go to the layers panel, and select the upper (blurred) layer. Reduce it’s opacity to about 30%, (or less, or more, depending on how lucid you like your frame to be). You will be seeing it on your screen as you reduce the opacity (opacity, not the “fill”).

6. Select the lower layer (not blurred one) and go to Layer >> Layer styles >> Drop Shadow. Add shadow settings as shown on the screenshot below. This will give your frame some more depth.
7. Now we will add some shiny / glossy effect to complete the result. This step is optional, as many people are not big fans of shines. Create a new layer. Using the Elliptical Marquee Tool, draw a circle as shown on the screenshot, which will cover approximately about 1/3 of the image. Choose the Gradient Tool (from white to transparent) and draw a line from the top of the circle to it’s end, or a bit more than the end, as we will only fill the selected area in the circle anyway. Once your ellipse got filled with gradually fading white, Select the eraser tool and remove the white circle from outside the picture, so that only the piece inside the picture will remain.
And… here is your final result:

Click HERE to download the free .PSD file of this tutorial. The download was available freely for 30 days, now it’s for Lorelei Web forum registered members only.