Borders

I've never spent any time, up until now, thinking about borders. Even when I've had a few of my photographs printed and framed, again, I haven't thought much about borders. I've considered the frame or the matte, which is a kind of border. However, I never considered actually applying a border to the image itself.

On the web, and even when printing your final image, a border can be very important. It can help with conveying the message of your photograph. With a border, you may be saying, here is where the image begins and ends. Other borders may help accentuate a specific feeling or mood.

So I've worked on a new image of mine and this time I created a border that I felt helped to reinforce the dream-like mood.

I created this border in Photoshop by selecting the perimeter of the image and then while in quick mask mode I used a splatter brush to draw the edges of the border. Next I added some Gaussian Blur to soften the brush strokes and edges. Then, I simply filled this area with white. I refined the overall thickness of the border by re-adjusting the canvas size of the image. This framed the image in a broken and hazy-like border that to me matched the dream-like feeling of the photograph.

Here's the same image without any border.

Which do you prefer?