Hi guys, Yanik here for Yanik’s Photo School.

And today we’re going to be looking at how to create a really easy and fun border around your images. Probably most of you, and I know I was doing that at the beginning, I was using my selection marquee tool, and I’d go by eye and trying to select something, and go “Is it all right on all sides, is it equal on all sides?” It’s kind of really, really annoying doing that. But there is a way that I found out how to do it without, you know, screwing around with all sorts of dimensions. It can all do it for you right away. So let me just undo this selection.

The first thing that we need to do is to duplicate our layer. We do that by doing control J, and then after that we want to select this whole image. You can do that by going into select all, or control A, is the four cut key. And after that you, and this is where the fun part is, and you’re going to probably go “Oh, it’s that easy?” and I’m going to say, “Yes it is. It’s a dirty little secret in Photoshop.” So, go to select, modify, contract, and here you put the amount pixels you want your border to be at. So depending on the image size you have, and the border size you want, it’ll vary. 75 pixels looks good for me. So I’ll just click on that, and boom, automatically on all sides we have 75 pixels, isn’t that cool? Now the next thing we want to do is invert our selection, you go to select, inverse. And then the next step is to go into quick mask mode. And we do that by either pressing the four cut key Q, or right down here at the bottom of your tool palette, you always have this little icon here that looks like that, which is the quick mask selection. Now once you’ve done this, the next step is to go into your filters, go into your filter gallery.

Now again if you don’t want add a filter, you just want a straight border. Skip this whole filter step, but if you want to add some coolness to your border, you can do that. Then you can just go and select any type of effect you want to create. I like this splatter, the spatter one here. And you can play with the radius, you can play with the smoothness, this looks good. And click Ok. And you can always see here, you can already see the effect it has on the mask as well. All right, now once you’ve done that, the next thing we want to do is get out of quick mask mode. So by pressing Q again, or by pressing the icon here, you get out of quick mask mode. And then you have your border selected with the filter we used.

Next thing you want to do, you want to create a layer mask on the top layer here that we duplicated. And this is the icon here, but by default it’ll create a black layer mask, we want a white one so want to hold the alt key down and click on it. And we got our white one, and what it did is that it took the selection and put it black. And that’s what we want. Now the next step is to add a new layer and you do that by clicking on this button here called create new layer. And you want to drag this layer in between the two images. Now once you’ve done that, all you need to do is select the color of your border. And in my case, I have black, let’s try black and see what it looks like, and we just want to use the paint bucket tool to fill that layer up with the color we want for our border, boom. And wala! We have our really cool spatter border all around our image. And you can try all different kinds of filters and play with them. You can create some pretty cool grungy ones with that and try different colors, as well. The quick and easy way to do a unified border all the way around your image, and it’s that simple.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and we’ll talk to you soon. Bye-bye.