I've always liked the frames you often see on images shot before the digital revolution. The 5x4 frames, the 'Hasselblad' 1x1 frames, they all look nice to me.

The type of frames I'm talking about, are the borders of the film negative that are not cropped out of the scanned file. I think they make a nice decor.

So how do we go about creating such a thing?, well, first of all I did a Google search for some images, and specifically looking for images containing the type of borders that I mentioned, a 1x1 'Hasselblad' border, a 4x5 Kodak frame and a neutral 4x5 border.

When I find what I'm looking for, I start to work on them in Photoshop, the images that I found needed a bump in resolution and removal of the image content to leave me with just the border an a blank content area. The final resolution of the border image is somewhere between 1500 to 2000 pixels for the longest end.

The files that I'm left with has a black border and white content. The white content will be transparent when we export from Lightroom. This is what they look like after the Photoshop job.

So you got Lightroom 2, now we need LR2/Mogrify. If you're on Windows you need to download a program package called ImageMagick.

Now you need the Lighroom plugin that communicates with ImageMagick, so head over to Timothy Armes and download his LR2/Mogrify plug-in for Lightroom 2. Read the install instructions provided with the plugin.

Now we're ready to apply some borders. It's quite easy, so let's just jump right in.

Select some images in Lightroom that you'd like to export with borders. Crop one image to 1x1, an the other image to 4x5 (portrait for this example).

Now select an image, and choose 'File -> Export' to bring up the export interface, we're going to create a preset for a crop with border, so it is easy to apply this effect next time you want it.

You need to make sure ImageMagick get triggered, so click 'Mogrify Configuration' and hit the button that says 'Insert'. now you need to point to the mogrify.exe file within the ImageMagick install directory. This is the file that process your image and composite the border image on top of your photograph when you export it from Lightroom.

Once this is done, you need to click 'Graphical Watermark', and hit the button that says 'Insert' again, 'Graphical Watermark' will point to the location of the prepared border image.

The watermark resize option sometimes need some tweaking to make sure the border file fits the image correctly. I can not give you a set of values that will work, you need to find those values for your specific border file. Also click the center check mark for 'Position', that way our image will be, well, in center.

You remember that the background of the border image is white?, here's the key, make sure that you set 'Multiply' as Overlay Mode, that way your white becomes transparent, but you already knew that.

Once your settings are all set, you can now save this as a Preset in the export dialog of Lightroom, click 'Add' and give it a funky name. Next time you need it, it is just a one-click operation.

That is really it, not exactly rocket science.

Now, lets look at some end results from this procedure. Hope you like it.