Framing a print

Erik -

Can you tell me how I would add a black boarder around a photo before printing it? Here's what I want, and how I tried to accomplish it.

I opened a photo that I recently took in photoshop. I changed the background into a layer, created a new layer below it and filled that new layer with black. Then I went up to the photo layer and clicked Edit - Transform - Scale and reduced the image by 5% W and 5% height. That gave me a nice black border around the image.

When I took it to get it printed, the top and bottom showed the black border, but the image went out to the edges on the left and right, completely covering the black border.

Is there an easier (more correct) way to add a border to an image?

Thanks,

Neolite

Say you want to add a black border of five pixels to your image.

1/ set your background colour to black
2/ Image>Canvas size and add ten pixels to width and height, working from the center. This adds five black pixels on every side.

Your method is ok, but a bit complicated. But the thinking is good.

Scaling requires the image to be resampled. On a photographic image resampling will always cause some deterioration in image quality. 5% may be negligible, but it is still preferable to avoid resampling when it is not absolutely necessary. The method Erik describes is the better approach.

Although your own approach was less than ideal, if you had black borders on the displayed image, they should have printed. My guess is the problem is printing related rather than Photoshop.

Was the image you had printed the same size as the paper you were printing to. Although the printer can adjust resolution, if the aspect ratio of the image is not the same as the papers aspect ratio, cropping will occur. It is possible to adjust resolution to ensure cropping is not required, but commercial printers will generally print to cover the full area of the paper, which means cropping some of the image if the aspect ratio's differ.

Sark

The size of the paper I am trying to print to is 8" X 10". To print a black border around the image (which is already sized to 8" X 10"), I thought I would have to reduce the image size by 5% in both width and height all the way around so the black border would show. For some reason, the left and right sides of the border get completey cropped off when I print.

I'm going to try Erik's technique the next time I send something to get printed. Each 8X10 print is $2.99 (US), so i want to figure this out as soon as possible.

Neolite.

Try this, it is basically what Erik suggested.

Open your 10 X 8 inch image. Open the Image size dialogue, make sure the Resample image checkbox is unchecked. The Document size setting for H & W should show 10” X 8”, if set to inches. Lets say you want a 0.5” border. Just reduce Heights 10” to 9.5”. The Width’s 8” setting will also drop because the aspect ratio’s are locked. (This will be slightly less than the 0.5” Height border, but we’ll deal with that later). Click OK to complete.

Next open the Canvas resize dialogue and increase the canvas to 10” X 8”. In the layers palette you can now add a layer underneath your image and fill it with black. Because your image is smaller than the black layer you should now have your black borders.

If you want your borders to be exactly the same width (0.5”) you will need to crop a small part of the images width to show more of the underlying black layer. This is because the width and height of a 10” X 8” image will shrink disproportionately. You will of course lose a negligible amount of your image.

Sark

Neolite.

Just one minor correction to the above. If you reduce 10" to 9.5" you will of course have 0.25" borders. For 0.5" borders you would drop from 10" to 9".

I guess you would have figured this out yourself, but didn't want you wasting another $2.99 :D Which incidently, is about a third of what I would expect to pay in the UK :(

Sark

Geez, $9.99/print in the UK? Send your files over to me, I'll add a black border and crop off half of it unevenly for only $2.99 :D

thanks. I'll let you folks know how my next "run" to the photoshop pays off.