Photography: Adding Borders
How To Enhance Digital Camera Images With Borders in Photo Editors
Jul 6, 2007
The basic technique is to set the background color to one desired for the border, usually black or some other dark shade and then increase the image size with the canvas size option and not image size tool. This leaves original image the same size with an area around it filled with the background color, or our border. This technique produced the first image in the series below.
This simple operation does not need an advanced photo editor, such as the Gimp or Photoshop; many simple free photo editors offer this function.
Two Borders
A further refinement is to add two borders. The first is a colored, or maybe white, and step one is to increase the canvas size creating a wide border. Then repeat the canvas size operation with a narrow dark border to simulate a frame. The wide light border acts as white space, isolating the image from any distractions. This demonstrated in the second image of our example series.
Borders Using Layers
Advanced photo editors can produce unusual effects, using the techniques of layers. This allows your imagination to run wild and match the style of the border to the image. The third image has a selectively lightened blue border. The editor for this example is Adobe Photoshop CS2, although the principals should apply to other editors with layer capability.
Firstly, the normal increase in canvas size operation is performed on the image to create the area for the new border. Then create a new layer and choose a color from the new layer dialog box or leave it as none and fill the new layer later with the paint bucket. The fill later option offers a wider choice of colors to form the basis for the new border. Although this is only for the border the whole of the layer area is a solid color.
The next step is to bring the background layer, containing our picture to the front. In the layer dialog box, select the background layer, the one with the picture, by clicking on the name of the layer. From the layer menu, choose smart objects and group into new smart objects. This allows the layers to be arranged, bringing the picture to the front and the only area of the solid fill layer visible is the edges, or our border.
To customize the border select our solid layer in the layer dialog box and then edit that part of the image using the wide range of tools available. In this example the dodge tool produced the lighter areas. One advantage of layers is that the dodge tool only affects the solid fill layer and not the picture.
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