I've had several requests asking how I get "those burnt edges" around some of my photos. What they are referring to are the black edges that I use to help frame the photo without losing the composition that I originally chose. The effect looks like this:

I first learned about this technique while searching for how to fake the Lomo effect. A Lomo is a Russian camera that typically takes a-typical photographs. You'll find blurry photos with vivid color that usually have the "burnt edges" to them making them extraordinarily unique and beautiful in their own breathtaking way. These odd results from a camera have created an entire society of photographers who crave this form of artistic expression.

What I'll explain here is how to achieve a similar effect with the help of my handy copy and paste tools, and the Flickr Technique group and this site where I copied the following instructions:

File: Open: the picture you want

Image: Adjustments: Brightness/Contrast: increase contrast by 20

Image: Adjustments: Hue/Saturation: increase saturation by 20

Choose the Rectangular Marquee Tool (your basic selection tool)

Change feather amount to 1/12 the width of your picture (if your picture is 600px wide, as all mine are, then you will set your feather to 50px.

Select your entire picture note: using select: all, will not work

Select: Inverse

Layer: New: Layer

Change your primary color to black. Fill the selection (on the new, blank layer).

Change the blend mode of this layer to Overlay

Layer: Duplicate Layer

Now select your base layer (the one with the picture on it).

Layer: New: Layer

Change your fill tool to Gradient

Change your Gradient Type to Spherical

Change your Gradient Shading Style to “foreground to transparent” (I believe this is the default).

Change your primary color to white.

With the fill tool selected, click in the middle of the picture, and drag the line out to the farthest edge of your picture (if it’s a portrait, use top or bottom, if landscape, use left or right).

Change the blend mode of this layer to Overlay

Change the Opacity of this layer to 80% (or whatever you see fit, you’ll see what I mean).

I once again followed the instructions and you can see my before/after shots:

Before

After

*Photos provided by Africa's Hope

Kingyo's site also includes an action for Photoshop, but I could never get it to work right for me. I always ended up with something like this:

I'm interested in seeing what you come up with!