Lightroom Tips – Creating Borders

By George Quiroga

Adobe’s Lightroom application has been my tool of choice for editing photographic images since the
introduction of Lightroom 2. I typically spend about 95% of my editing time using Lightroom. Prior to
Lightroom 2, my tool of choice was Adobe Photoshop CS2. While Photoshop is a feature-rich product
that addresses the needs of many types of Creatives, Lightroom is primarily intended for photographers.
Since I am primarily a photographer, I only used a small fraction of the capabilities of Photoshop. When
Lightroom 2 was released I found that it covered about 90% of the features that I used in Photoshop.
Lightroom also provided new features in workflow and image management that I found to be
cumbersome and slow in Photoshop. The additional features along with the integration between
Lightroom and Photoshop made it compelling enough for me to switch to Lightroom.

For me however, there are a couple of “must-have” features that Lightroom does lack. One is the ability
to overlay and blend images of textures for vintage or artistic effects. The other feature that Lightroom
lacks is a quick and easy way to embellish a photo with a simple or artistic border. I’ve always been a big
fan of black (or white), sharp, fuzzy, or irregular borders on images. These edges really add to an
image’s presentation and help focus the viewer’s attention to the image.

Lightroom does offer some abilities to add a simple border in the Print module when output is to a
printer but I wanted something that I could apply quickly in the Develop module with some artistic flair.
Well now I found some ways to add borders easily without having to flip back and forth to and from
Photoshop and I would like to share these techniques with you.

Copyright © 2010, George Quiroga 1

One of the things that I like about Lightroom is how easy it is to explore, discover, and find new
inspiration when editing images. My first discovery when experimenting with settings was using the
Post-Crop section of the Vignettes panel. I found that if I set all of the sliders to the extreme left a crisp
beautiful border reminiscent of looking through a vintage camera’s viewfinder is possible (Figure 1).

Figure 1

You can slide the Midpoint slider a little bit to the right to adjust the width of the border (Figure 2).

Figure 2

You can then save this as a preset to quickly apply it to other images (this preset is also available at
http://www.presetsheaven.com/2008/11/11/how-to-make-simple-viewfinder-borders-in-lightroom/ ).
The vignette method is fine for some images but since there is still a substantial amount of inner
rounding, even at the minimum setting, it isn’t something that I’m likely to use on the majority of my
images.

Copyright © 2010, George Quiroga 2

In my ongoing search for a way to create borders, I discovered a creative use for the Graduated Filter
(Figure 3). The Graduated Filter is normally used to darken a portion of an image using a gradient of
tones from dark to light. By only creating a thin gradient at each edge of the photo and adjusting the
width of the dark and light portions along with the exposure settings, a variety of edge borders can be
created.

Figure 3

When positioning the gradient on the edge of an image, I found that holding down the shift key is very
useful because it locks the orientation into a vertical or horizontal position and prevents it from
accidentally rotating. Shrinking the gradient is accomplished by dragging the outer lines inward. You can
shrink the gradient to a point where the light tones are not visible resulting in a hard, crisp edge. By
adjusting the Exposure and Brightness sliders to the extreme left, a completely black border can be
created. For some images I adjust the Exposure and Brightness settings so that they are not at the
darkest setting and I also keep the gradient object a little wider to create a style I call the “Black Fuzzy
Edge” (Figure 4).

Figure 4

Copyright © 2010, George Quiroga 3

Figure 5 shows gradients of various sizes and exposure settings applied to the edges of the image.

Figure 5

I save the exposure and brightness settings as presets in the Graduated Filter tool by selecting the drop
down menu next to the Effect name and choosing the “Save Current Settings as New Preset” menu item.

Once you have added all four edges to the image you can also save the entire frame of gradients as a
standard Lightroom preset and quickly apply them to other images. One caveat however, is that the
position of the gradient objects is fixed to the layout of the image that you developed them on. If you
apply them to another image that uses a different cropping factor, the objects may not be immediately
visible. In that case you will need to reset the cropping, reposition the gradient objects to where the
crop will be, and then re-enable the cropping.

I hope that you find these techniques for creating borders in Lightroom useful. Maybe in a future version
of Lightroom they will no longer be necessary.

George Quiroga is a freelance photographer living in South Florida.

His web site is at http://www.qnetx.com

Copyright © 2010, George Quiroga 4