Sometimes a border can really help to set an image off, and becomes part of the picture itself. Here our image of a mountain bike race would really benefit from a more dramatic border, and with the aid of Photoshop's tools we can make the rider step out of the image creating a much more dynamic effect.
We start by creating a New Empty Layer above our background layer by clicking on the 'Create a new layer' icon. We are now working on an empty layer.
From the Toolbox call up the Rectangular Marquee tool. Now click and drag the marquee tool over the bottom area of our image just above the rider's foot to the base of our image. We can now see the familiar 'marching ants'.
Making sure that our colours in the toolbox are set to default - Black as the foreground and White as the background colour- this can be quickly applied by pressing D on the keyboard. Our next job is to fill the selected area with Black using the Paint Bucket tool.
Selecting the Eraser tool and with a small soft edge brush we can begin to remove the black area revealing the image beneath. To make this easier we can reduce opacity of our black layer 1 to around .40 % which will enable us to see the details beneath. To adjust the size of the brush try using the square brackets on the keyboard. The left hand square bracket making the brush small, whilst the right square bracket will make the brush larger. Increasing the opacity back to 100% the rider's foot will now be clearly visible above the black border.
To add a thin line around our image we first change the foreground in our Toolbox to grey by calling up the colour picker. Once we have done this we can call up the Rectangular Marquee tool. Click the top corner of our image and drag it down and outwards until it reaches the top of the black border, selecting the whole image. From the Edit menu select Edit > Stroke, once the stroke dialog box is open enter a width of 5 pixels and click OK to apply.
We can remove the grey stroke line over our rider's ankle by selecting the Eraser tool as before.
Tip - If at any time you find you have erased too much, try using Ctrl + Z which will undo your last action or you can also try using the History palate.
Before adding the border around the rest of our image make sure you have the background colour set to Black. To add the border select the Cropping tool and drag it over the entire image. Using the grab handles we can pull the crop tool out into our work area keeping an equal distance to both the top and the sides. The grab handles can be used to make any final adjustments. Once we are happy, double-click inside the frame or hit the Enter key to apply the border.
Our finished image.
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