I Made Myself A Large Framed Print From Scratch

I really want a print to go on that wall above my computer, and actually I refurbished my office about a year ago, and when I refurbished my office I promised myself that I was going to make some prints and make some artwork to hang on the walls. I never did it. However, since buying my new printer, and if you haven't seen that video I'll link to it somewhere over the top of this screen, there'll be a card, well that video goes into all the details about buying and setting up a new printer, calibrating the monitor and getting perfect prints. So it seems only fitting that I should make a print for myself. But the problem is, the print that I want to make, which is this panoramic here to go on the wall there, well is that. It's panoramic. You can't just go to the shop and buy a panoramic frame. So I think I'm going to make one myself. Oh yes, strap yourselves in ladies and gentlemen, because we are trying something that I have never attempted in my entire life. There's going to be mistakes, but there's also going to be successes. So sit back, because in today's video we are going to make some stuff. So this is the space in question, this is where I do my photo editing, my video editing, my tax returns, and it's just crying out for a beautiful panoramic print. Now I don't want the print to be as wide as the desk, so I'm measuring the desk and then taking off about 20cm, which leaves me approximately 1.2m, but I want the frame to start and end on the edge of those slats, and not be hanging in between those slats, because then it's just going to look messy. So this is the wood that I'm going to use to make my picture frame. It's 7cm by 2cm, and already we have a big problem. Yeah, the problem is that these boards, they're too wide. As you can see here, I'm mocking up a rough outline of my frame, and the width of these boards, well it just looks ridiculous and is not going to make for an elegant photo frame. So what I need to do is take my circular saw and rip them lengthways, in other words, cut them in half all the way down, but yeah, I'm not very confident of doing a clean, neat, straight job, so we'll see how this one goes. Now I haven't bought any new tools for this project, but I may have gone overboard on PPE. You know what it's like, you read horror stories online. Anyway, better to be safe than sorry. Now without a shadow of a doubt, my photography and printing skills are far superior to my woodworking skills. And here I am two inches away from making a terrible, terrible mistake, and we've not even started this project yet. Alright, so the first side... Sorry, hang on. So the first side of my utter inexperience. So I was cutting the wood, and I thought to myself, hmm, how far does the blade actually go through? Because if I keep going, there's a chance I can cut through my table. And yeah, the blade should not be sticking down by that much, so I need to make it so that the blade just cuts through the wood by a couple of millimetres. Ah man, nearly cut my table in half then. So for anybody ready to dive in in the comments, don't worry, I unplugged the circular saw before putting my fingers anywhere near those teeth. I may be a complete amateur and quite incompetent, but yeah, I have no plan on losing my fingers today. So to my surprise, this cut went very well, and I ended up with a perfectly sized piece of wood for my panoramic picture frame. Admittedly, not as perfect if I would have just bought the correct sized piece of wood from the shop in the first place. But look at the mess it's made. Wood everywhere. Now here is where I'm going to turn pro. You see that black thing on the table? That is a dust spout of some sort. And I'm going to attach that to my circular saw, and then I'm going to put it onto the hoover. Now I think that this action alone has just turned me from an amateur to a, well, less of an amateur. I was going to say pro. Definitely not a pro. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you attaching a hoover to a circular saw. Look at the difference in mess. There's none! There's hardly any! So now we just have the final two cuts to do, and yeah, I forgot to switch on the hoover. So this is just, erm, whole thing was pointless. Dust everywhere. But we got the wood cut, and now we are ready for some frame building. All right, so this is now going to be the new thickness of my frame, which is far more than what I was thinking with the big fat one. That would have just looked, er, yeah, it wouldn't have looked too good. Well, this edge is not perfect, but I think once I sand it and stuff it'll be fine. Now what I need to do is take this square profile, this edge of the frame, and I actually need to take a channel out of it. Like I need to create an L-shaped profile running down the side here, all the way along. Because in that lip, like in that profile, that's where your glass is going to sit, your artwork's going to sit, your mount's going to sit. Yeah, it's pretty important. It's actually called a rabbit. And the way I'm going to cut that is with my router, and I originally bought a router so that I could do some edge banding in my camper van, which I never ended up doing. And to my absolute delight, when I started researching this photo frame project, I realised that my router came with a selection of router bits, and in that selection was a bit specifically designed for cutting rabbits. So this is my second power tool, my second job, and my second show of incompetence. Yeah, a clamp would have been good in this scenario, I think. So this is the profile that I was talking about, you can see that there. Now I have to do this across all of the wood. Hopefully the next pieces will go smoother than this one. So the rabbits were a success, hoovering myself down, and now it's time to cut the 45 degree corners with my terrible mitre saw. Yeah, I wasn't joking about how naff this mitre saw is. You see, I need to make perfect 45 degree cuts in order for the picture frame to be square when it's complete. But this thing, this has got more play in it than the Premier League. You put it on 45 degrees, but it really is a shot in the dark as to whether or not you're actually going to get those 45 degree angles. And making these accurate mitre cuts are by far my biggest concern. Once these are done, we're home and dry as far as I'm concerned. So what I've done, I've ripped a couple of pieces of wood, I've routed in a rabbit, and I've made a few 45 degree cuts, and I have learnt so much in those utterly simple tasks. I'm telling you, this is very exciting. I'm learning, and I am thoroughly enjoying myself. And at the end of it, I'm going to have something that I've created with my own hands, which will perfectly complement my photography. So this is the frame from the front, and you can see it's very square. It's got quite a sharp edge on it. I'm thinking we get the router out again, put a different bit on, and we see if we can't create a nice profile around the inside edge of the frame just to give it that nice professional look. Rather than just 90 degree, 90 degree, 90 degree, 90 degree, we put a bit of a bevel on it, or a chamfer, or whatever you call it. I don't know. The risk is, of course, that I completely mess it up, and I've just ruined all of this work. All right, I had a two inch practice on this scrap piece of wood. I think we're ready to commit. So can you believe it? I make yet another mistake on my frame building woodworking journey. You can see here I'm routing the edge, a nice profile, and then I get to the corner and, oh, yeah, the router goes around that corner and basically shaves a corner straight off, as you can see here. Now, what I should have done is completed all my routing before making those 45 degree cuts. So routed in my rabbet, routed on the profile, then final thing, do the 45 degree cut, but I didn't do it that way. I did it the hard way. So what I need to do is complete the rest of my profiles whilst damaging the corners of each one, and then just go ahead and trim down each piece of wood again with another 45 degree cut, losing about five mil on either side to get a clean cut. My picture frame will be shorter by about 10 millimeters, but that's okay. It's all a learning process. So it appears I've made yet another mistake, and I think I'm just doing everything in the wrong order. So what I should have done is routed in all my channels, my rabbet and my bevel, and then I should have sanded it, and then finally I should have done the 45 degree miter cut. You see, this is pine wood, which is really soft, so when I've been sanding it, I've accidentally taken away a tiny bit of material, a couple of mil from the corners, which means they're not perfectly flush 45 degree anymore, so they're not matching up. It's really annoying, but it's good because I'm learning. So the next one I do after this should be better. But what that does mean is I now have to shave a few more millimeters off the total size of this picture frame, so it's just getting smaller and smaller. But luckily it was big to start with, so it's not too much of an issue. Give it a cut, and then we're ready for the glue up. So that is so much better. Note to self, do your miter cuts right at the end, after everything else. So now it's time to glue it all together. So there are special clamps you can buy to hold four corners together. Of course, I don't have any of these, so I am just using masking tape. I'll do the frame in two halves, and when those two halves dry, I will bring them together, making everything much easier. Now, whilst the glue dries, it's time to go and make the print. Now, I mentioned it before that a couple of weeks ago, I released a video where I go through my step-by-step process to creating a perfect print. But if you haven't seen that video, well, this is what I do. First, I check the image for dust spots and anything I might have missed during the editing process, boosting the dehaze slider is a great way to do this, and this file looks clean. I then soft proof my image, duplicate it a few times, and make three or four different edits. I then do a hard proof, where I print out each of one of those slightly different edits, and choose the best one. Because a backlit computer screen is not the same as paper that's reflecting light. Now, if you're interested in learning more about printing, I definitely recommend you and watch that video from a couple of weeks ago, because it's really simple stuff. And once you understand it, you'll be able to knock out prints that look exactly the same as on your monitor. So, with the hard proof done, and the best looking of the three prints selected, well, there's nothing more to do other than go ahead and commit to the big print. And it's always a nerve-wracking time, because if it doesn't come out right, and you misjudge the editing and the processing, then it's a lot of ink and a lot of paper wasted. But thankfully, this is coming out beautiful. It's really difficult to get across on camera how good these prints look. They have a three-dimensional quality to them. And I cannot wait to get this mounted in its very own homemade frame. So, this has come out near on perfect. It's fantastic. The colors, the contrast, the paper. I'm using a textured white matte paper. It's very difficult for me to show the texture on camera, but it's just ever so slightly textured, like a watercolor paper. It just makes this image beautiful. It's 106 centimeters wide, so just over a meter. So, it's not a small print, and the detail in it is phenomenal. And it should be, really, because this image was taken with a GFX 50R, and it was a stitched panel. So, it's a super high resolution print. And I'm very, very pleased with it. So, I can't wait to get this in the frame, once the frame is finished. Now, one of the reasons I chose this photograph to print, well, it should be fairly obvious, looking at this frame here, because everything in this room is so monochrome. We have gray walls, we have black and white prints there, black and white print there, black lamp, a white cabinet, a black printer. There's not much color in this room, and sometimes it can feel a bit cold. So, essentially, I want to inject more warmth into the room. So, I've gone for a lovely autumnal print, which is going to go above my computer. Again, bringing more warmth into the office, and hopefully that sort of warm theme will migrate across into this side of the office, which is just super monochrome. But yeah, that's why I chose that print. All right, so the glue is dry, and we now have something that resembles a photo frame. But these joints here are glued, and they're not strong enough as they are. So, I need to strengthen them. Now, there are many ways you can do that, none of which I have the tools for. Apart from one, the most simple method, which is to drill a hole 45 degrees across here, and then use a dowel, stick it in, glue it, cut it off, sand it down. That will strengthen these corners, because when it's all done, this is going to be quite a big, heavy frame. Of all the things I've done to this photo frame so far, this is the most nerve-wracking, because if I mess this up, the frame is ruined. And as you can see here, I've not done the cleanest job. But I think I can fix that later on, as long as I don't make any more mistakes. Oh, no. Well, after fixing that dowel, and drilling it out, and drilling back in, it all seems to be going quite smoothly, as I add support to the corners of the frame, making it so much stronger. Now, to fix my terrible woodwork, well, the internet is a great place, isn't it? You mix wood glue with sawdust from your sander, and hey, presto, you have a filler that's going to match the wood perfectly. So here I am, basically hiding all of my woodworking sins. So whilst my sins are drying, it's time to start crafting the components of my photo frame. Now, what I'm doing here is creating my mat, or my mount. Not too sure if it's a mat or a mount, actually. Anyway, this is the piece of card that is going to sit behind the print. Now, typically, with a card like this, you cut a window in it, and then that is your mount. And I'm going to do that using this tool. This is a bevel mat cutter. So this mat cutter is a really great tool. I've had this for years, and the way that it works is there's these two rails on the side of the mat cutter that hook onto this ruler here, so they work together. So in order to get a perfect straight cut, you just slide this along the ruler. Now, when I slide the mat cutter down the ruler, I have this little thumb press here. So I press this, which pushes the blade through, giving me a 2mm, 45 degree cut. And all I have to do is when I start cutting, and when I plunge the blade, there's a line on the back here, a marker. All I need to do is make sure that that marker is aligned with the lines which I've just drawn. Now, what's really important here when cutting the mat or the mount, is that the good side is face down. So you've not got your hands and your ruler all over it, marking it up and making it nasty. But this caused me a problem, because I didn't account for the mat being flipped upside down. So my 45 degree bevel is facing the wrong way. So everything I'm doing now, yeah, complete waste of time. Oh, it's millimeter perfect. Nah, no, it's not. Oh my God, what an idiot I am. Because I was cutting the mat upside down, the 45 degree bevel is the wrong way. Yeah, you can see here, there's a lovely 45 degree cut, but it's on the back of the card. You can see that with pencil marks. So all I have to do is make the cut again, the right way around this time, shaving off about a millimeter. So actually, it's not too bad. And we'll just add it to the seemingly endless list of mistakes I'm making in this video. So the mat or the mount fits perfectly. And here I'm just marking out the excess photo paper so I can trim that away. Right, let's talk about glass. Now I wanted non-reflective glass for this project. And if you've never seen a frame with non-reflective glass when you haven't lived, it's like there's no glass there. It's so good, the technology, and that's what I wanted. However, for the size of my photo frame, I couldn't find a company that would deliver the glass. You had to go and collect it and there's no local shops in my area to go and do that. So I did a bit of looking around and I found that what I could get delivered was non-reflective perspex. Now I'll be honest with you, when it comes to perspex versus glass, I am a bit of a snob. But there's no reason for that snobbery. I can't tell you one single reason other than perspex scratches easier than glass. But this is a photo frame hanging on a wall. There should be no reason why it's getting scratched. But to me, perspex, I associate that with cheap frames and naff kind of plastic. You just want high quality glass. But I thought about it. I thought, well, if the perspex is non-reflective and assuming it's not scratched, it's actually, it might not be such a bad deal. It's a heck of a lot cheaper. I can get it delivered to my house, which is nice. And it's also a lot more lightweight. So the frame itself isn't going to weigh as much. Now I am a little bit worried about flex because it's such a long photo frame and such a wide print. But assuming we don't get any flex and assuming we don't scratch it, I might have to change my opinion on perspex versus glass. I don't know. We'll see. We'll get it cut. And then obviously when the frame's all put together, we'll have a better idea. Cutting this perspex proved quite problematic. You see, it wasn't too bad on the short end. You make your score mark and then you break the perspex using these pliers on that score mark and it just folds away. However, doing the same thing lengthways over a meter of cut. Well, it was nigh on impossible. And the problem I had was when I went to break it, the break didn't follow my score mark. The break peeled off down into the area where you would see it in the frame. Now I only had one more go at this. So I scored extra hard and twice and tried my best to get a clean break. But yeah, I just, I just couldn't do it. Should have just done that from the start. Note to self, scoring and pliers don't work on pieces of perspex this big. And believe me, I tried. Anyway, back to the garage now where we're going to sand off all of that dry glue and get the frame ready for finishing. This is by far my favorite bit where you see the transformation. You see this rickety old cheap looking pine frame transform into something quite different. And dare I say it, quite beautiful. In the evening when I get home, always hope to find you all alone and out of hard way. Every time I look around, I hope to find you looking back at me. You're everything I ever hope to see. In the morning when I get up, wish that we could stop and take each day. In the evening when I get home, always hope to find you all alone and out of harm's way. Well, we are approaching 21 minutes into this video. And if you're still watching it, thank you so much. I really hope you're enjoying it. You might have noticed this video is not sponsored. So instead of taking on more sponsors this year, I thought I would back myself. So if you're interested in a print or one of my photography books, there's a link to my website in the description below. And if you don't fancy that, but you're still enjoying the content, then please do give it a like and engage with the video with a comment. I always read through the comments and enjoy doing so. And finally, to those who are not subscribed, please consider subscribing. I know what it's like. You watch a video, you enjoy it, then you don't know my name. You don't remember the channel and you'll never find me again. But by subscribing, you can go into your subscriptions. And there I am. Lots of landscape photography content. Anyway, that's my plug for now. Thank you, guys. My biggest concern is dust on this piece of perspex. Because as soon as I remove the plastic film cover, it's going to be like static crazy and attract every single particle that's floating in this room. And there are lots. So I'm a bit dubious about this anti-reflective perspex glass, as they call it. I don't know if you can see. I don't know if it comes across on camera, but it's frosted. That's how it works. Like, as I look at this, you can see my body looks blurry, right? It looks out of focus. But the closer I get, then the clearer things become. So we'll just see how it looks when it's all put together. Here we go. This is the crucial bit. Making sure that there is absolutely no dust on the inside. If it's on the outside, not a problem. Inside, trapped forever. So I said I didn't buy any new tools for this project. That's not strictly true. I bought myself a point driver. This was about £30 on Amazon. And you basically need this to finish off your frame, as I will demonstrate. So there we have it. Mission accomplished. Now the frame doesn't really hold up to scrutiny, and I made quite a few mistakes. I could have done a better job sanding and finishing. I also could have done a better job cutting the perspex. My rabbit, that channel where your glass and artwork sits in, that wasn't deep enough. So I couldn't fit a proper backing board on there. However, saying that, considering I've never done this in my life, I am very pleased with the outcome. And I would give it 7 out of 10. And I'm glad I made those mistakes. And I'm glad it's not perfect. Because it means I can do it again. I can remake a better frame. Something with hardwood. Something more impressive. I don't know, I had a lot of fun doing it. Now let's talk about the glass. Or the perspex. It's non-reflective perspex. And it's got this weird kind of diffused coating on it. It's almost like one side is matte rather than gloss. Yeah, I'm kind of undecided. I do like it. Like that matte finish on the perspex rather than a high gloss. I suppose that's where it gets its lack of reflectivity from. There's a slight issue with it in that in order to get complete clarity from your image, it needs to be in contact with the perspex touching. But of course, I have a 2mm mount or matte in there. So my artwork is 2mm away from the frosted perspex. So when you look at it close up, my image is a little bit diffused. A bit soft. As if I was using a black mist filter on my lens. Something like that. I don't know, it's difficult to put my finger on. I don't know if I like it or not. It's almost like a happy accident. It looks more painterly. It's quite nice. But it's not intended to be that way. I'm really torn on this. Now, the great thing about the perspex is there's no flex. I was worried it might be warped or bent, but it's not. It's as straight as anything. The anti-reflectiveness... No, it's nowhere near as anti-reflective as anti-reflective glass. It just kind of diffuses the reflection. So they're a bit softer. So I suppose in that sense, it's good. Now going forward, if I ever wanted to sell framed prints, would I sell them with perspex instead of glass? I'm not sure it would be better for shipping, but glass would always be my first choice. So if anybody knows any suppliers who can ship non-reflective glass in large sheets, or if there's any glass suppliers in the northeast of England, get in touch because I'd like to try this project again, but with glass. But for now, this I think is... Yeah, it's more than adequate. Anyway, hope you've enjoyed this one. See you in the next one. Cheers, guys. Bye-bye.