We’re up in the mountains for a weekend away to celebrate Chris’ birthday. Today, we took a quick day trip to a nearby town that has a little boardwalk on the lake. We found the boardwalk and all the carnival rides, but we also found it all boarded up for the winter. I think someone forgot to tell them it’s spring (although it’s still only in the upper 40s/lower 50s here).

I took a photo of this poor, lonely carousel. The horses were resting along the gate, waiting for their time to shine again. I loved the colors of the carousel and, although I think the gate is a little obtrusive, I really liked the color of it, too.

Since the colors were so bright and busy in this photo, I decided to make a border for it in my photo editing program (I used Gimp, but you can use Photoshop or anything similar). I opened my photo in the program, did any edits I felt the photo needed, then copied it. Then I opened up a new canvas (usually about 25-50 pixels bigger, both for height and width — you can crop it down later if it’s too big). I then pasted my original image into the new canvas.

I decided on two borders for this image, leaving the first one white. I find that if you have really rich or busy colors in an image, adding a white border before a color one helps your eye focus right in on the image and kind of contains it.

I repeated the process detailed above for the blue border, making the canvas 50 pixels larger than the white canvas this time. To change the colors of your borders, simply click on the paint bucket icon (see red circled icon on the image to the left) and then click on your canvas. You can change your color options by clicking on the swatches below. (See Day 22 for another example of a bordered photo.)

Have fun bordering your images. But be warned — once you do one, you’ll never want to stop!