# How do you create Borders & Frames?



## John N. (Dec 11, 2005)

A border or frame around a photo almost always helps enhance a photography. How do you add a border, frame, and shadowed border around a photograph? A pictorial walkthrough using a editing program like photoshop would be greatly appreciated by this challenged mind. 

Thanks. 

-John N.


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## carpguy (Feb 3, 2006)

What sort of effects are you thinking of?

I use Photoshop much too much to guess at what folks have trouble with.

A few simple effects (in Pshop and with Mac keystrokes)…

1) Open an image and double-click on Background in the layers palette. This will make it Layer 0, a non-background layer. 

2) Under the Image menu choose canvas size (opt-cmd C) set to pixels and add twice as many pixels as you'd like for a border (1 for each side).

3) Add a new layer, move it to the bottom and fill with foreground color (opt-DELETE) to create a new background color (white for paper, any color you like for other situations… the background color of your website f'r instance).

4) Reselect your image layer and and start to play around with Layers >> Layer Effects. Drop Shadows and Bevels are the obvious favorites but take a look at Inner Shadow… it will push the image down behind the background plane as if it were matted. I generally find it subtler and more elegant than a drop shadow. Multiple effects can be applied.

That's a simple place to start… keep playing. Photoshop is large.

Don't know much about freeware type image editors.

(I'll see if I can't find a place to upload some images and do an illustrated step by step)


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## houseofcards (Feb 16, 2005)

John,

I'm certainly not any kind of advanced photographer or editor, but a really fast and easy way to make a border is just to use the basic paint program that is part of all microsoft operating systems.

I use this quite often. All you do is:

1.Downside the photo to a manageable size like 1024 x 768 or 800 x 600 so it can be viewed completely on your screen. (I usually do this in microsoft office picture manager)
2.Open up paint and open file in ms paint.
3.Choose the rectangle tool and then choice the option which looks like a frame. You can also choice color and thickness at this time.
4.Drag your cursor across the picture and position the frame.
5.That's it!

- Jeff


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## John N. (Dec 11, 2005)

Thanks Carpguy and Jeff. The directions were very helpful and super simple. . At first I was a bit confused with the mac functions described above, but I figured out its equivalent on my keyboard.

I founds some easy to use photoshop actions that create beautiful borders with click of a button.










Thanks again,

-John N.


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## turbomkt (Mar 31, 2004)

There are a number of actions out there for PS and PSP that will do the job nicely as you've found. PSP has a lot of that built in and is less than $100 for the full version (or $50 for students at places like academicsuperstore.com)


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