Wool and Spice

So because I got nothing else to do (not) I’ve been playing with Photoshop Elements. One of my latest aha moments is how to put a border around a photo using Elements. This is real basic stuff so if you’ve been doing this a while, you probably are saying to yourself: “Pfffft, I knew that.”

I learned how to do this by reading this post from Pioneer Woman which explains how to apply a simple border using the Big Mother Photoshop program. Turns out it’s very similar in Elements.

Step by step here’s what I did. (I’m assuming you know the basics of editing in Photoshop Elements so I won’t go into those details here. )

1. First I opened an old photo of a blossom on my passion-flower vine and made all my tweaks to it to correct lighting, cropped it, sharpened it and saved it as a jpg for the web. I’m not very good at this, but I’m getting better.

I made sure that the size I selected was about 50 pixels smaller than the desired finished size.

2. Then I saved the tweaked photo under a new name, so I could play with it without messing up my good photo. I think Photoshop Elements saves a copy anyway, but I’m not taking any chances.

3. Next I went to Select/All to get marching ants around the outside of the photo.

4. Then I went to Edit/Stroke (Outline) and clicked on it to bring up the dialog box. As the Pioneer Woman post says, select a small pixel width (I chose 5 px) to get a narrow border, select a color for your border and select the Inside Location.  I picked up a light pink color from the flower instead of white, although I don’t think you can tell.

5. The next step is to change the canvas size to add 50 pixels all around. I did that at Image/Resize/Canvas size. Enter 50 pixels in the New Size dialog boxes, being sure you enter it for both dimensions, height and width. Don’t make the mistake I kept making which was to put the desired finished size in here. I kept entering 600 x 600 and wondering why my whole screen turned black. Check the Relative box and select a color for your border. I chose black after playing with green and purple.

6. Now you have a light color narrow border surrounded with a black thicker frame. To add another narrow white or pink border around the outside, do steps 3 and 4 again. Or quit while you’re ahead.
It’s also fun to experiment with other colors that pick up highlights from your photos.

I’m finding the best way to learn Elements is to work with it, pick up tips here and there and just do it. You never know what kind of aha moment you’re going to have. Sort of like with knitting.

Tags: borders, Photoshop Elements