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Introduction
One question that comes up so often is how do you add a border in Photoshop? What if you want to add a border, yet don’t want it to cover over your perfectly cropped image?
This tutorial will give a few basics to help understand two principles of adding a simple border, but with a disclaimer: In many cases, borders may not be well received, especially if they are large, over-powering, over-complicated or brightly colored.
The dilemma
The image below does not have enough room to add a border without hiding some of the rock itself, and was already at the maximum dimension allowed for a contest. Covering up portions of the rock would be detrimental to the composition: We need more area, or in Photoshop terms, canvas to work with.
Step 1
Go to the toolbar and select Image, Canvas size from the drop-down menu as shown below:
Step 2
A new pop-up will be on the screen as shown below. It shows the current image dimensions and canvas extension color as it is now: 700x457 pixels and white. If you want a different color of border, here is where youwill want to choose it, either by the drop-down menu, or by clicking on the white box and use the color palette.
Step 3
In the case of this image, I wanted a 20-pixel border on all sides, and added a total of 40 pixels to each of the dimensions. This will now increase the size of the image to 740x497 pixels as shown in the pop-up below, without altering any of the image itself:
Step 4
With the new dimensions being larger than wanted or allowed in a contest, the image will now need to be resized back down. As shown
below, go to the toolbar, select Image and Image Size this time as opposed to changing only the canvas:
Step 5
In the pop-up box on screen shown below, we will chose how the image will be re-sized. A few things need to be selected here to maintain the proportions of the image.
First, make sure the Constrain Proportions and Scale Sizes are selected.
Second, and depending on what version of Photoshop you are using, the method for resampling will vary, and Bicubic Sharper as shown, was selected by default, according to the preferences I set in version CS2. (Earlier versions of Photoshop will have normally Bicubic as the resample method.)
Next, in the Pixel Dimensions box, type in your desired longest side dimensions. In this case, I selected the maximum dimension of 700 pixels in the width, and let the program fill in the second length. Hit OK to resize the image.
Step 6 - Final Image
Only thing left to do now is to check Layers, scroll down and see if Flatten Image is selectable (always good to check this just in case any extra layers formed and then flatten the image if there were any) then save it and submit the image with its new 20-pixel frame that did not cover any of the original image:
What if you wanted to change your mind now?
After looking at the white border, suppose you wanted to change it to a black border, or at least see what it would look like? A multitude of steps again as previously done?
You are only a couple mouse-clicks away at this point, as the image sizing no longer needs to be adjusted and only the white portion need be changed.
The following steps are done using the Stroke command, and a very easy way to add a simple border on an image that can overlap onto the existing image, such as the final image above.
Step 1
We need to select the whole image this time by using one of two methods:
Use the Rectangular Marquis Tool and click outside of one corner and drag all the way to the opposite corner and release the mouse, or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-A to select the whole image. You will see the whole outline of the image flashing the little dashes.
Step 2
As shown below, you now want to select Edit, Stroke:
Step 3
A pop-up will appear with a number of selections needing to be made, such as the amount of border, the color and the direction to “paint” the border into:
In this case, I already knew the width of the border previously done in white and chose 18 pixels, and selected black as the color. Because the stroke command can be used on any selected portion of an image or all of it as done here, we need to choose the Location as Inside, thus filling an 18 pixels section inside where the flashing dashes are. Default Mode and Opacity are 100% and should be left as that. Click OK and right-click the image, and Deselect.
You can see the 18 pixels above were done by choice to leave a 1 pixel inner white trim edge as an added touch. In the previous step, choosing the color and width of the stroke can be any combination your creativity takes you. Had this been chosen as 20 pixels, it would have only put a solid black frame in. This method of applying a simple 10, 15 or a bold 20 pixel solid white or black frame on an image is the most common and easily done process. Keeping it simple goes a long way to prevent distraction from the image itself.
(c) Copyright 2006, Brad Petersen & EyeFetch.com. All rights reserved.
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