Using black & white frames on a colour photo in Photoshop

Have you ever noticed that it's the black-and-white packages that have all the cool edges and photo frames? But what if you want to apply a frame to a colour image? As in all things Photoshop, there are multiple ways to do this, but I like this quick trick.

1. From Photoshop, make a new layer that is a merge of all the current layers (i.e., "The Move" or Ctrl-Alt-Shift-E).
2. Send that merged layer to your black and white module (e.g., Topaz BW Effects, Nik Silver Effects, On One Perfect BW...) from the Filter menu.
3. Now, within your B+W module, don't do any B+W adjustments - just leave it at the initial, neutral conversion. Or if it's loaded your last settings, turn all the B+W effects off. Then go to town on the frames or image border settings. When you're happy, return to Photoshop and change that layer's blend mode to Luminosity. Voila! The colours will return and you'll have a lovely edge effect.
4. Some optional extras: If you don't want colours to interact with the frame at all, you might have a bit of masking to do, but that will depend on the frame you've chosen and the effect you are after. (Put a white or black layer under the colour layer so that when you mask the colour layer, the frame above blends with the white layer.) And if you want to get fancy, do play with the B+W effects too - you might find something really cool and unexpected happens to your image!

Here's a quick example:

Updated: 24 April 2026 (minor edits)