How To Create Scrapbooking Photo Borders

One of the great parts about scrapbooking is to be able to create stunning pages for the photos you are choosing to put in them. Sometimes, however, you may feel let down by the boring borders on the photos themselves. You can change this by learning Photoshop tools and how to Photoshop for your personal preferences. If you cannot find the exact frame that suits your purposes, you can always make use of Photo Shop downloads to find the perfect frame. There are several sites online that offer Photo Shop downloads and plug-ins for free. A simple Google search will lay them out for you. Sometimes, however, you need to create your own custom border because you want to match the lime green of the page perfectly with the border of your photo. By following these steps, you will be able to create custom photo borders for your scrapbook pages.

1) The first thing to do is, obviously, to select your photo. Have a look at it and decide what elements, if any, you want the border to highlight. Do you want a simple border that is merely thicker than normal? Do you want a frame that looks recessed? Do you want to steer clear of the traditional white border altogether?

2) From the floating toolbar, select the “Ink Dropper” tool.

3) You now want to select the whole image – if you do not do this, you will frame only a small part of your photo, if you manage to frame anything. Choose “Select” in the top toolbar and click on “Select All”. Your photo will now have a broken line around its outer edges.

4) Next you need to select “Edit” and look for the “Stroke” tag. A box will pop up and you will probably want to adjust the settings inside it. The first setting is the width of your border – this is displayed in pixels. The higher this number, the wider your border.

5) Click the “Color” box twice and the color palette will appear. You can choose a color anywhere along the rainbow. Alternatively, you can use the ink-dropper tool to select a color from within your photo. This is a great way to make a color in the photo pop out. Click on the “OK” button.

6) If you want a solid border, make sure that the opacity is set at 100%. If you want to have your picture showing through the border, set the opacity to less.

7) Click on “OK” and your border has been created.

Once you have practiced this a bit, play with creating different borders. For example, you can create a border that is 75 pixels wide and then overlay that with another color at 50 pixels width. You can, in the same way, create a succession of borders to create frames that rival Photo Shop downloads. At the end of the day, all that is really left to do is to practice and play with creating borders.