Add Border for Printing
Example
This simple example adds a small border on the image which
is often desirable for prints on your home printer.
Fig. 1. Before - with no border
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Fig. 2. After - with black border
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The following steps add a 12 pixel border in black.
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Change the "Background Color" to a color of your choice.
Skip this step if you already have the proper color.
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At the bottom of the toolbar, there are 2 large rectangles.
Click on the lower one to change the background color.
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Either interactively select a color of your choice or type
in RGB values. In this example, I simply typed in 0 (zero) for Red,
Green and Blue to obtain Black.
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Click OK.
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Image > Resize > Canvas Size. See Dialog box in Figure
3.
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Check the Relative box
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Change both measurement types to Pixels (this is easy
to forget)
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Enter a number in each of the boxes for Width and Height.
I used 12 in this example. (see note below)
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Click OK.
Fig. 3 Dialog Box for Resize Canvas
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Notes:
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I used a 12 pixel border for these small images, whose dimensions
are 400 by 348. For a 2 MP image, a proportional border would be
about 40 to 50 pixels. For a 5 MP image, a border of about 70 would
look similar. Feel free to experiment with larger or smaller borders.
These sizes were given as a starting place.
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In most cases, a neutral border is more effective.
Black, gray, and silver are usually good choices. White is a good
choice if printing on a dark background.
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Photoshop Elements has a few "frames" that you can use, but
they are not very good. Elements also allows you to slightly jazz
up a border using Layers and Layer Styles. JASC PaintShop Pro
has a nice selection of frames, and you can get frames from third parties.
However, even nice fancy frames are printed on flat paper, thus they look
flat. I recommend keeping your borders simple so that the viewer
focuses on the image, and not on the border.
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