Give your pics the edge with an arty border
Use our free, easy-to-use creative border pack to enhance your images and give them extra appeal
On this month’s disc, you’ll find no fewer than 20 custom-made photo borders. Each and every one has been crafted by hand to add an artistic edge to your images. Whether you choose to make prints or post them online, the effect will set your shots apart from the competition!
The borders have been designed to work with all kinds of images, from portraits and macro shots to still life and landscapes, and you can further customise them to give a variety of effects. Even better, they’re really quick and easy to use, so find your favourite pics, and transform with an artistic new look in just a few minutes.
Here’s how you can use them. The steps are described in Photoshop, but you can apply the same principles in any image-editing software that supports layers.
Paste your pic into the border
Open the border of your choice from the Creative Border Pack folder in the Resources folder. All the templates are sized to A4 at 300ppi for ease of printing; to make an A3-sized print, go to Image > Image Size, set the units to Centimetres, and enter a Width of 42 and a Height of 29.7. Next, open the image you want to use. Press Ctrl/Cmd+A to select it, Ctrl/Cmd+C to copy, and Ctrl/Cmd+W to close it down. Your border image will be back on-screen. If the image you’ve chosen is horizontal, leave it as it is; but if it’s vertical, go to Image > Image Rotation > 90° Clockwise. Now press Ctrl/Cmd+V to paste in your image.
Choose a white or black edge
With the white edge, your image will be all set for printing, and the picture will bleed out of the base paper in an appealing way. If you want a black edge instead, perhaps for online use or if it suits your image better, do this…
In the Layers panel, make sure the picture layer is active by clicking on it, and change the Blending Mode from Screen to Multiply. You’ll see the picture revealed around the edges. Now click on the Background Layer (the border) and press Ctrl/ Cmd+I to invert the image and reverse the colours. You’ll now have a black border surrounding your image.
Resize your image to fit
The image will sit on top of the border, so to make both visible, open the Layers panel (Window> Layers) and click where it says Normal. From the dropdown list, select the Screen Blending Mode. This will allow the border to show through.
Your image is unlikely to be the right size for the border; to make it fit, press Ctrl/Cmd+T and zoom back with Ctrl/ Cmd+Minus until you can see the whole bounding box. To rescale, hold down Shift and drag the corner handles until the image fits neatly. Make sure the edges of the image are covered by the border’s white surround, and press Return to confirm.
Change shape and save
You can change the border’s shape – ideal if you want a squareformat image. To do this, click on the border layer to make sure it’s active, and press D then X to reset the colours so you have black as the background colour. (If you do this with a whitebordered image, just press Ctrl/Cmd+D). Now press Ctrl/ Cmd+A followed by Ctrl/Cmd+T, and pull in the side handles.
To save the bordered version of your image as a new file, go to File > Save As and choose JPEG as the format. Rename the image, and click Save. In the JPEG Options dialog box, set the Quality to 10, and click OK.