After setting up my blog, and having made the decision to post more regularly and with more useful content I spent yesterday thinking...what should I post about? Well, thanks to airewindel who asked me a question on deviantArt I got it!

If you visit my gallery you will notice that the more recent photos all have a border around them. The question was "how do you get the [border] and sig in everytime, the same?" I'll write about the borders first, and then the sig - as the border one is much easier :)

Firstly, I'm using Photoshop CS, so if you use another image editor, the instructions will probably not match exactly - but I'm sure most image editors will have similar functionality.

  1. Open the photo/image in Photoshop :) Make sure the layer is not locked, otherwise the below steps won't work as nicely.

  2. In the top menu go to "Image -> Canvas Size" A new window showing details about the Current Size of your image should appear. In the same window there is the option to choose a New Size.

  3. In the New Size section, check the Relative option. The width/height values should now be 0.

  4. Change it so the width/height is now 6 pixels. Leave the Anchor (white box) in the middle. This will expand the canvas 3px each way (top, right, bottom, left).

Canvas Size

  1. After clicking OK, you'll notice that there is a very tiny extra transparent border around your image. Create a new layer, drag it below your image and fill that layer with white. You've now got a 3px white border!

  2. Repeat steps 2~5 for the black border. Except this time, use a larger value (eg. 40px), fill the new layer with black and drag it below the white layer. Your layers should look something like this (you can ignore 'fuzzly' layer - that's my sig):

layers.jpg

That's it! Nice and simple borders. You can experiment with different thickness, colours etc. or even multi-bordered borders. I find that some pictures look better with just a white border (for some reason I feel white borders don't work that well with a small black border inside).

Your final product will look something like this... Round and Round