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I'm creating a watercolor effect on a photo and I'm struggling to create textured edges around an image I have. What I'm trying to achieve is something similar to the image below. I know I have to create a mask of some sort, but not entirely sure how to create the texture so it looks like a natural watercolor painting. I have created the watercolor effect and the paper texture, I just need to create the textured edges. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
This was originally a Congress Library photo of an ex president. I trashed it for this demonstration by applying blue color, a fake paint filter and by messing manually the edges so that there's a good reason to insert a frame.
A new layer filled with white is inserted below the portrait.
A rectangular selection is drawn over the portrait to mark the wanted area of it. The portrait layer is closed temporarily and the selection is filled with black in the New layer:
Numerous Photoshop filters can create the an edge texture to the black area. Try for ex Ripple, Ocean Ripple or Spatter. The next is Ocean Ripple (your example images may have Ripple).
The simplest way to use it is to select the white with the magic wand and to use this selection in the portrait layer by deleting the selected area:
The granularity of the edges in shown method harmfully depends on the pixel dimensions of the image. You may need to make at first a smaller black area and then drag it bigger to get big enough teeth. Or you can paint the whole edge manually for big size features. Try the Smudge brush because it works to both directions. The edges in my 1st image were spoiled with the Smudge brush (the bottom and right edges got also blur).
Do not delete the original image layer. Work with a duplicate. Or learn to do this in the layer mask which can be redone as many times as needed without affecting the painting.
It may be a good idea to replace the the bottom layer with something a little grey and to add some shadow effect to lift the frame separate from the image. But these were not asked, they depend on artistic decisions and are bad traps which easily make the image look overdone, so I skip them.
Here's a non-destructive method.
Make a path with the Rectangle tool U, use guides if you want to position it
Select the Brush tool B, then choose a textured brush, make it quite large, set the foreground colour to black
Create a new transparent layer above your artwork
In the Paths panel, right click the Work Path, and choose Stroke Path
Choose to stroke it with the brush you selected.
Right click the Work Path, and choose Make Selection
Do Edit > Fill, and choose to fill with the foreground colour (black).
You will have an image as shown below, with a mask layer above your artwork. If your artwork is made up of many layers, group them all except the top layer you made. Click and drag the mask you made below your artwork layer or the artwork group.
Move your cursor between the two layers and hold down Alt, until you see the cursor change to the clip icon, then click there to clip the picture to the mask
