Speeding up your workflow; adding borders in Photoshop and creating Actions By Mark Reeves ARPS

By Mark Reeves ARPS

Speeding up your workflow; adding borders in Photoshop

This article will explain how to go from this

to this

in seconds!

The key to adding borders and frames is successive resizing of the "canvas"; the imaginary base layer of all images in Photoshop. Enlarging the canvas, as opposed to the image itself, leaves the image untouched whilst extra pixels are added around it to make the canvas bigger. By repeating this process several times, borders of different thicknesses and colours can easily be added. To see this in practice, try the following:

1. open any image in Photoshop

2. From the menu select Image > Canvas size

This will open the following dialogue box:

The top section of the dialogue box reports the current size of the image in pixels. Below, it asks what size you would like the new canvas to be. You have the option to specify this in pixels, in various measures such as inches or cm, or as a percentage of the original image.

Ticking "relative" will allow you to specify the new size relative to the old size, whereas leaving this unchecked you will have to specify the new size in absolute terms. For example if you wish to increase a 6000 x 4000 pixel canvas to 7000 x 5000, you can either:

• leave "relative" unticked and enter the new size of 7000 x 5000 or

• tick "relative" and enter 1000 x 1000 - which will have the effect of adding 1000 pixels in each dimension.

Whichever approach you choose, the result will be the same.

[Note: if you specify the new canvas size as a percentage, say 10% relative, the canvas size will expand by different amounts in each dimension - in the case of a 6000 x 4000 image it will grow by 600 pixels in width and 400 pixels in height.]

The "anchor" is used to specify where the new pixels are added. By default, Photoshop will add the pixels around all four sides of the image so that the image remains centered on the canvas. We will leave this default setting unchanged.

Finally, and very importantly, the "canvas extension colour" must be specified. If you wish to add a white border to your image, you should specify white. To frame the above sunset image (which was 2700 pixels x 2700 pixels), I used the following steps:

1. increase the canvas size by 6 pixels in each dimension with the canvas extension colour set to black. This adds a thin (3 pixel) black stroke border to the image.

2. Increase the canvas size by 400 pixels in each direction with canvas extension set to white. This adds a small white border all around the image.

3. Increase the canvas size by 6 pixels in each direction with canvas extension set to black. This adds a second thin black line.

4. Increase the canvas size by 2000 pixels in each direction with canvas extension set to white. This adds a large white border all around the image.

5. Increase the canvas size by 560 pixels in each direction with the canvas extension set to grey. This adds the grey frame to the image.

To automate the process, so that in future you can do this with a single click:

1. Open the Actions pane by selecting Window > Actions from the main menu. This will open a new pane similar to the one below:

2. Click the "create new action" icon (5th from the left at the bottom), give your action a name (such as "Add Borders") and then click "Record". When you do this the round record icon should turn red. Photoshop will now record whatever actions you take.

3. Complete the canvas resizing steps as above (using whatever dimensions you like)

4. When you have finished resizing the canvas, click the square icon next to the red circle to stop recording.

In future, when you wish to add the same set of borders to an image, just open Window > Actions, click on your Add Borders action and then on the triangular play button at the bottom of the dialogue box.

You can now use this ability to record actions to automate many processes that you may perform regularly in Photoshop - e.g adding titles or a signature to an image, resizing an image for a camera club DPI competition, adding a group of commonly used layers such as levels, curves, high-pass filter, monochrome conversion etc.

Mark Reeves ARPS