hello I'm Robin Whalley welcome to Lenscraft today I'm going
to explain three ways to add a creative border to photos using the Nik
collection and in case you're wondering you can still get the Nik collection for
free I'll include a link to the details of how to do that in the video
information below the first option for adding a border using Nik silver
Efex Pro
if I launch silver Efex Pro you can see a section called finishing
adjustments
the most obvious option toward the border is in the section called image
border here you have 14 creative borders that you can add to the image as you
move your mouse over each one in the list you'll see a preview of that border
types 13 and 14 a simple black and white borders but the other borders are more
creative and imitate some of the traditional fine art techniques from the
darkroom when I pick one of these borders I then have some control over it
with the other sliders the size slider controls the size of the white border
edge around the image
the spread slider then controls how far into the image the border spreads
you can use the clean and rough slider to smooth out the jagged border effect
or to make it rougher you also have a very border control below these this
uses a four digit number to create a random border effect clicking the very
border button just generates a new random number you can also enter numbers
directly into the field the other option that you might want to use with your
border is Bernanke's whilst this isn't really a creative border it can add
nicely to the effect just remember that you're controlling each of the edges
independently
so that's it for boarder options in silver Efex Pro but once if you
don't want to convert your image to black and white the first alternative
we'll look at is in Nik Color Efex Pro
here you'll find a field an image border
a game there's a drop-down with the borders and you'll probably recognize
the layout and controls from Nick silver effects we have the same 14 borders that
we can add but without converting the image to black and white
the controls are also the same as in Nick silver effects but there's one
additional feature that I want to discuss in color effects Pro we can use
control points with the opacity slider to selectively fade the border by using
the overall opacity slider you can control the borders transparency in
addition you can use control points to make localized adjustments to the
opacity for example I could use a negative control point to hide the
border in certain areas then in other areas I could make the border appear at
full strength using the plus control point
now let's look at another powerful option for adding a creative border to
an image you'll find this in Nick and the log effects pro now analog effects
was a new Nik plug-in created by Google after they bought the Nik collection
from Nik software because of this the interface is a little different to the
other plugins you can use Analog Efex to simulate film effects although the
defaults are quite severe over on the right side you see the different types
of adjustment you can apply to an image whilst over on the left side you have
the different tool combinations you can use to create the border I'll use the
camera kit where I can select my own effects now I don't need any of the
adjustments from this other than the frames option so I'll remove the others
in the frame section I have three sets of borders or film edges I can select
with the drop down for this example I'm going to use the filmstrip group I can
now pick the border that I want to apply
whilst there are a lot of film edges here that you can use you don't have
much control over them all you can do is scale them to make them larger or
smaller using the slider if you find you use a board at frequently you can save
it as a custom preset making it easy to add in the future
just be aware that selecting a preset will replace any other adjustment you've
added in our Analog Efex whilst there are limitation to these methods for adding a
border they are still very useful I hope you found this useful
I'm Robin Whalley you've been watching Lenscraft I'll see you soon
for another video