So you've cropped and scaled your photograph, and edited it every way possible in Adobe Photoshop; yet somehow it still doesn't quite seem complete. A great way to finish a photograph is to complement it with an appropriate border. This helps a great deal with presentation, especially if you are planning to submit your work to a website, or even to place them within an online portfolio. The process of adding a border in Photoshop is simple, but the trouble comes with deciding on one suitable enough for the subject matter and style of the photograph itself.
This tutorial-esque piece will cover the rudiments of creating a border and applying an outline, or stroke, to the photographs edge. Afterwards you can use this as a template to customise to your liking.
Adding a border
I assume that you have finished tweaking your images and that is has been flattened, et cetera (for advice on these techniques please refer to the appropriate articles). Once the image has been resized to the desired dimensions, via image -> image size, it is necessary to expand the canvas to the size you wish the border to be. To perform this task, go to image -> canvas size. For a nice even border increase the height and width by around 60 pixels. This will stretch the canvas with your photograph still positioned in the centre.
Now create a new layer and place it under the photograph layer. There are two methods to fill the border with the colour of your choice. The first method is to go to edit -> fill and select the foreground colour you want and press ok.
The other is to select the foreground box by clicking it, selecting the colour desired, and the using the shortcut alt + backspace (option+backspace on Mac). To be honest, you will usually select white for the border colour so that shortcut will become rather handy. If you placed this layer correctly underneath the photograph layer, you should now have a nice white border.
If you wish to give the photograph an outline to help separate the picture from the frame, proceed with the following. Create a new layer and place it directly above the photograph layer. Crtl + click the photograph layer in order to select the layer content, but make sure that the newly created layer is the one that is selected.
Then go to edit -> stroke. There are a variety of settings here, namely pixel width, colour, position. For this example we will set the width at 1, the colour to black and the position to outside. There you have it, a simple and flexible way to create borders for your photographs.
To iterate, you can use this method create borders of any size, and it is rather handy if you want to give your photograph a Polaroid feel. Experiment with different proportions, colours, et cetera and see what works best for your photographs.
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