Borders for Prints

Hey,
Well if you say you've been looking for this kind of border for years, and have not be able to put one together your self, then I would think that it might be just the thing you've been looking for since it's taken you this long. I would bite the bullet on it and just go for it if it means that much. You'll always have it.
-Angel

[Tony_Gamble]

Mark,

Qimage has a border creating facility.

It is within the Cutout operation. There are also quite a few extra borders in the library section of the Qimage forum on Yahoo.

Tony

[James_Walden]

Mark:

I use a PS plugin called PhotoFrame 2.5 by Extensis. It comes with more than 2000 frames on the CD that you can combine to get multiple effects. For my gallery show of 60 images that I produced earlier this year, I created 2 templates using a black rectangle and a black square sized to fit my images inside a white border sized to fit 13x19" paper. Next, I combined three frame layers from PhotoFrame over the black edges in both templates to achieve the filed down negative carrier effect you mentioned. I then resized, rotated and flipped each of the 3 frame layers, or used fewer layers, to get multiple versions of the templates. Finally, I layered my images over the black so it would appear as the edges of a negative.

I received several positive comments on opening night about how much people liked the effect of filing down the edges of my negative carrier. They were all surprised to learn that every image was printed digitally.

You can see samples of this technique at: http://www.jwaldenphotos.com/secondary_show.html

Unfortunately, I think Extensis has now combined PhotoFrame into its Imaging Suite package costing $499., but Adorama appears to still have the single product PhotoFrame for $189.95. There are always cheaper options, but PhotoFrame works well for me.

Jim Walden

[James_Dyrek]

Mark
I am also a fan of that negative carrier black line. Photoshop CS2 (not sure about older versions) has a Stroke feature in the Edit menu that will let you put a frame/border around a photo. To do this, you select the entire image, click the brush tool, go the the Edit menu and select Stroke. A window comes up that will let you pick the color and width of the frame, and whether you want the border to be inside, centered or outside the image. I use "inside" and use between 2 and 4 pixels depending on the size of the print. The resulting border will be smooth, however, if you want the outside edge to have that ragged effect of the filed negative carrier, you could make the border larger and freehand erase the outside edge. Some of these steps can be saved as a action and I believe that it would be possible to save your own frame/border and add it as a layer to other photos.