Pixiq

One of the hottest trends in digital imaging these days is adding irregular, ragged, or artistic edges to photographs. Even staid National Geographic magazine used soft-edged photographs to illustrate their story on famed cartographer David Thompson. While the option of adding creative edges to photographs using traditional darkroom techniques has been around for quite some time, I’ve found that it’s much easier to produce these kinds of effects with digital imaging software. In case you’re wondering why you might want to add creative edges to your own photographs, here are a few reasons to consider:

• Photographs with irregular edges add variety to your portfolio images by providing visual relief from straight-edged vertical and horizontal rectangular shapes.

• Images with white or light-colored corners tend to have their edges disappear from the final print. A creative frame adds a decorative border to the photograph while giving the finished image a clearly defined edge.

• Instead of cropping to clean-up distracting elements, you can use creative edges to hide minor compositional flaws while adding a touch of panache at the same time.

• Creative edges can add an artistic touch to an image that might otherwise appear too literal.

• Playing with creative edge effects is fun, and gathering from viewer reactions, many other people like them as well.

Creative Edge Power Tools

Auto FX (www.autofx.com) is the company that first made adding creative edge effects popular with digital imagers. Their Photo/Graphic Edges software can add torn, ripped, deckled, feathered, painted, film frame, and darkroom-styled edges to any image. The latest package contains four visual effect modules—Edges, Montage, Vignette, and Frames—and each module gives complete control over your edges and also lets you apply surface grain, lighting, shading, matte, or colored backgrounds. It also has 17 volumes of effects, including Traditional, Darkroom, Painted, Etched Scratchboard, Darkroom Transfers, and lots more. Included in the package are more than 10,000 edges and well as hundreds of color frames and feathered vignettes. There are 1000 matte textures and 200 lighting tiles to give images and edges a custom look and feel, allowing you to load multiple edges for an infinite combination of effects.

I’ve always liked adding creative edges to a photographs, and my favorite plugin for accomplishing this has always been on One Software’s PhotoFrame Pro. It offers thousands of frames, including color, traditional, and realistic looking frames, and there are several tools that let you try variations before making a selection. For example, multiple frames and edge effects can be selected to compare how they look. The Random Frame Generator will add three to five frames that can be adjusted and then applied. A built-in Frame Browser helps you find the frame that’s “right” for your image. The Frame Preview Grid lets you preview multiple frames at once with your image as the background. You can apply a border as a layer mask and save your favorites for access later. PhotoFrame Pro is compatible with Max OS and Windows computers.

Nobody loves sloppy image borders on their photographs more than me, and when I saw Sloppy Borders Volume 1 from Kubota Image Tools (www.kubotaimagetools.com), I fell in love. Kubota has done all the hard work and created a package of more than 100 ready-to-use borders that anyone with Photoshop CS or newer can use. Kevin Kubota and Lensbabies’ Craig Strong worked in the darkroom and printed the borders using a variety of filed out negative carriers.

The prints were scanned at high resolution and prepared for overlay with any image file. Kubota created scripts to size the border to match the original image file resulting in an easy way to apply a border to any image no matter what its size, cropping, or orientation. Borders can be added to one image at a time or run in a batch for a folder full of images. You can add color to the borders with the bundled Sloppy Colorizer action. Also included in the package is a bonus Photoshop action that automatically creates 4 x 6-inch (A6) prints with sloppy borders for printing proofs.