These are frames, to be placed in the /frames directory in Paint Shop Pro 7. These are uncompressed, and some are quite a few megabytes. But they are .zipped up for web transfer, and that can trim off a lot (it's the same as using LZ77 compression when saving a frame as a .pfr file, in PSP). Still, there's one .zip that comes in at 3 meg with just three frames in it.

Frames work with a transparency in the center, using some particular color on the pallette. Generally, the frame should touch the image border. There shouldn't be space around, outside. However, psp can also allow for space outside the frame if it curves or is an irregular shape. The inside transparency value still lets whatever through, regardless of shape. And a separate mask is used to set transparency, as it were, for areas outside the frame. Masks can be directly associated with a particular layer. Black is used for transparency. And saving a mask adds a bit of overhead to the frame, on disk. There's some inconsistency in the way Paint Shop Pro paints these non-square frames. If the image is seen as too small by the program, it won't scale the frame outside the image - to make the whole thing much bigger, in other words. You have to experiment, yourself, to see if you can get the image to where such a frame will wrap around the outside, rather than just clipping part off as a direct overlay within the existing borders of the photo.

Different methods were used to create the frames, here. Sometimes the PSP 7 Inner Bevel was used. Most of the time, it was either a single application of Blade Pro, or multiple passes to build up a bead in Blade Pro. The textures were sometimes those from PSP, some from this catalog, and elsewhere. Various filters were used, particularly the photo retouch filters and also such as Noise, Edge Preserving Smooth, various gamma/contrast adjustment, and so on. These tend to come in a little blurry when resized to fit the image in question, so a quick Effects, Sharpen, Sharpen couldn't hurt. The frame is kept in a separate layer, initially (unless you merge it, later), so the sharpening only affects the frame.

A couple of plastic looking frames. Again, used a combination of Blade Pro and PSP 7 Inner Bevel.

DOWNLOAD TECH FRAMES [312K]

Some frames called 'French', because they put me in mind of something of a French style, but really just based on an altered photo texture from the catalog. This texture seemed to lend itself really well to this.

DOWNLOAD FRENCH FRAMES [2.8M]

Leather textures, or what wound up looking like leather textures. The ragged looking one with the slots started out with a glass texture, of all things, and went from there. Good for those photos with simple, large, well defined subjects and various brown tones. Might look good with an 'outback' portrait, or the like.

DOWNLOAD LEATHER FRAMES [1.2M]

Used the glued-up cutting block/ work bench texture (which is the background for this page) for a simple light wood frame. A few Blade Pro bevel on bevels later, some glassiness and so on, and it got dark very quickly, for a different sort of wood.

DOWNLOAD WOOD FRAMES [1.3M]