If you’ve gone through the trouble of picking out the best professional photo paper and printed it out in stunningly beautiful high quality, why should you let it languish in a drawer or a barely opened photo album? If you take a great picture of your family or a sunset that you absolutely love, you should display it! It should be in a frame in the living room or the hallway.

There’s no reason you need to take it to a store to get framed and matted. You can do this yourself! Don’t believe me? Here’s how easy it is. Grab yourself a mat. This is basically a sturdy piece of cardboard that is usually colored on one side. It’s like a really thick cardstock. Take your photo (which you printed on photo quality paper, right?) and measure it. You want your mat to cover a little bit of the photo, maybe about a quarter of an inch on each edge should be covered. So when you measure the mat, make it about a quarter of an inch SMALLER on each edge. Draw your lines and use a ruler to make sure they’re absolutely straight. Then punch a hole in the middle of the piece you’re going to remove and cut it out carefully using an exacto knife. See? You’ve made a mat! Now that photo will look great hanging on the wall where it belongs.