Ever bought a great piece of paper only to find yourself working on a layout thinking, “I wish this paper had a scalloped edge!”? There are many ways to obtain scalloped edges. Here is ONE way using Photoshop.
Steps:
1. For this tutorial, I wanted my scallop to be on my background cardstock that is behind my main focal photo. I have added the cardstock behind my photo and am now set to “cut” the paper digitally.
2. My scallop is going to reach from my photo edge out to the edges of the cardstock so I have used my shape tool to make a black rectangle on top of my main photo. I made the rectangle the same size as my photo. This can also be accomplished by duplicating the photo layer and then going to the layer styles and adding a black color overlay to the picture. Both will yield the same result.
3. I now want to make a path that is also the same size as my rectangle. I will be using this path shortly to draw on the scallops. To create the path I have selected my shape tool once again, but this time I have gone up to the top left and selected the paths option. It is the middle square of the three squares in the top left of the menu bar. I then went back to my layout and dragged out a rectangle path shape. You can see the path shape when you go over to your layers palette as I have shown here. The layers palette has tabs at the top that say layers, channels and paths. If you click on the paths tab it will show you your newly drawn path. You can check your path here and then click back to your normal layer view.
4. Now we need to make the scallops follow along our path. This is called stroking the path and we use a brush to do this. You can essentially use any brush to stroke your path, which will result in various different edges. You can have scallops or pinked edges. The sky is the limit. For scallops, you will need a hard round brush. I see mine to 185 pixels and spaced them 95% apart. You can adjust your brushes at the top right of your Photoshop menu where you see the brush tab.
5. Now we are set to stroke the path. To do this make a new layer by going to LAYER>NEW LAYER at the top. On this new layer go back to your layers palette and select the paths tab button. You will now see the path previously drawn. At the bottom of this paths palette will be a button that says STROKE PATH WITH A BRUSH. Click on this. You will now see your circles going along your path. I made my circles black to correspond with my black rectangle. If you want to go to UNDO you can adjust the sizing and spacing of your scallops until you are happy with their placement. At this point you can delete the path by making sure the path is selected (it is blue on the paths palette) and then hit delete.
6. Now we want to merge the two layers together. To merge a shape layer you first need to rasterize it. Go to LAYER>RASTERIZE>SHAPE. Rasterize both the shape and stroked layers and make sure one of them is above the other in your layers palette, as we will be merging them together.
7. To make them into one shape go to LAYER>MERGE DOWN
8. You will now have one shape that is scalloped (all black) this is basically a template for cutting out with. To cut the cardstock, I used my magic wand tool. Select the magic wand and then select the black scalloped template. You will see marching ants around it.
9. We do not want to cut out the shape this way though as it will be backwards. To fix this go to SELECT>INVERSE. Now the ants will have selected the inverse of the black shape. On your layers palette deselect the black layer by pressing the eye next to that layer. It will now be invisible on your layout but you will still see it in your layers palette. Next, I made my cardstock layer the active layer by clicking on it and then I hit DELETE. This “CUT” the scallop out of my paper. Pretty nifty!
10. For the next three photos, I have shown how to cut a scallop from a straight sheet of paper. It is basically the same steps except that you do not need to make a path. You just draw a line of circle down your page with the brushes spaced out, as you so desire.
11. You then draw another black rectangle on top of the circles and rasterize the shapes once more and merge them down. The rest of the steps will be the same.
12. HAVE FUN!!!
