Still Quirky After All These Years
p?tr??k said:
Try this. Select your photo then contract the selection to the size you want. Then press ctrl+shift+i to inverse selection. Right click and select 'via layer cut' now you have the outer edge on a seperate layer. Then you can just turn the opacity down on that layer. Is that what you mean? \:]
Hi
p?tr??k,
This method would be so much simpler (wouldn't it) if you could actually
Contract a selection after a
Select All command (or from selecting the entire photo with the Marquee or Lasso tools). Unfortunately, you can't. The only
Select>Modify command available is
Border.
The main problem with using the
Border command is that it actually creates a feathered selection (which you will see once you fill or delete it). It's not even a true feathered selection either. It's more of a diamond gradient and not exactly a highly sought-after effect. This is definitely one of those things our loving
Adobe should have fixed a long time ago.
Nevertheless, a great "work-around" is to go ahead and choose
Border and give it 1 pixel border (this will reduce the amount of feathering to "almost zero") and then use the
Expand commad to bring the border in to the size you want. Since
Border creates a
border selection around the image, you have to
expand (not
contract) the selection to make the border "wider."
Another little caveat here is that the
Contract or
Expand commands are pixel-ONLY-units. This means you will have to do some pre-calculation based on your
dpi to know how many pixels (of your image) make up a centimeter (for 72 dpi it's 28 pixels or 57 for 2 cm). This is why, in the methods we outlined above, we used the
Transform Selection... option as it allows you to change the units (on the fly) and make your calculation through simple subtraction.
Once you know how many centimeters wide or high your image is, you can subtract 4 cm to bring each side of your selection in by half that amount (2 cm). Simple (sort of). And best of all, any of these methods can be turned into an
Action which would be very useful for batch processing or trying to process multiple images.
As we said, there are some better methods for creating a simple "solid" border around an image using a "non-destructive" approach. However, we will wait for
Martin to post a sample of what he means before going into these.
BTW,
Via Layer Cut is a very nice and quick approach to the destructive method. Nice one! :}