Prepping photos for framing

I wanted to frame my kids' recent school photos in the 4x6 frames I'd recently bought.  Here's the original pic of my son:

The problem was that they weren't the right proportion and I didn't want to crop them.  To solve the problem, I stole a page from the digital scrapbooking book.  I opened a 4x6 document in Photoshop and covered it with a patterned digital scrapbooking paper.  Then, I plopped the photo down on top of it.

I adjusted the saturation and lightness until my (originally green) paper matched the gray background.  Then, with a soft brush set at 22% opacity, I erased the background to allow the pattern to show through.   Here's the finished result:

The original picture of my daughter:

And the 4x6 version: