Digital Darkroom

4. After making the second oval selection, I had to invert it, so I went, again, to Select to Inverse. I wanted to use a nice dark blue for the top matte, so with the Color Picker tool, I clicked on a dark blue color in the water beneath the boat. Then with the dark blue color set as the foreground color, I again went to Edit to Fill and using 100 percent filled the selected area with the dark blue color.

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5. Having filled the top matte area with the dark blue color, it was then time to make the dark blue-colored area look like a piece of matte board by giving it some texture. I went to Filter to Texture to Texturizer. In the 100 percent preview window, place the cursor and drag the image to an area where you can see the effects of the Texture filter. Next, select Canvas in the window labeled Texturizer. Remember that the selection of the dark blue area is still in place, so whatever you do with the Texture filter will only occur in the dark blue area. In my case, I set the Texturizer tool to Scaling 169 percent; Relief 6. The exact settings of this tool depend on just how much texture you want in your matte.

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6. At this point the picture is finished, so I went to View to Show to Grid and unchecked it to remove the grid. Then, I went to Select to Deselect to remove the last selection. And, there was my masterpiece, ready for printing and framing!

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