help making specific borders

[arthurking83]

Hey folks, I'm not normally the kind that asks for help with such trivial things but without any other way to put it... I need help.
(ie. I can't figure out an easier way to do what I want to do)

I recently scanned nearly 100 old photos for my mother, and had to edit a few to remove dust stains scratches and stuff, and well it was tedious and boring and I'm not going to edit them any more than what I've already done.

But, I had to crop many to remove certain blemishes and so forth, and many of the images were actually cut out photos anyhow.. so a lot of the images are non standard image sizes, that I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to print at the local photo printing service(Officeworks :p)

They actually produced OK to nice quality images from the scanned images, and the D300 images I printed(for my folks, of weird stuff around their house) printed brilliantly! :th3:

So I need to create specific sized borders for each of the scanned images to make them fit to a standard photograph size(I prefer 4x6), and all of the images are basically non standard and nor are they uniformly sized, so batch editing them with a border is not going to work either(I think??)

What I need is either a specific border making software(must be free, as I'm never going to use it ever again) or a PS action to allow me to drop an image onto a canvas of preset dimensions(in this case 4x6 or 6x4) ratio is what I need.

I can make individual borders using PS with their resize canvas editing thing-a-me-bob feature, but that's going to be even more tedious than the editing I've already have done to these scanned images.. ie. that's not going to happen in my mothers lifetime(I have better things to do, even when I have nothing to do!!).

Funnily enough, I think I have a last resort, in the form of Canons print utility software that usually comes shipped with their printers.
I will have to download this software(I know it's a free download on canons site) install it again, and I have no issues with that, but I've never saved an image in that program, and I don't even know if you can save the image with the border to a file anyhow?

I used to have a Canon inkjet that died, and I threw out the CD of the Canon EasyPrint program too, or whatever it was called.
But this program allowed you to print your non standard sized image onto standard sized paper, so that there was a border around the actual photo.. so in effect you could print a square crop image without distortion onto a 4x6 print size piece of paper.

At officeworks their Kodak kiosk printing contraption didn't allow you to do this. It only allowed full page printing(that I saw) which was annoying as it only allowed you to crop the image to standard size, but not use a border to keep the entire image, and with 98 images to check and sort, I wasn't going to waste my time cropping.. so I just printed them off and.. well they came out cropped badly.
No big deal and I'm willing to do it all again(the printing that is) as she wants copies for her friends and all that. Printed over 200 images for $30 odd dollars(she still wants more copies)
Some of the images are over 70 years old, and have lot of sentimental value to her and her remaining family, she's sending them copies too... etc, etc.. blah blah.

if there's a free border making program(not BDSizer it doesn't do what I need :() it'd be nice to hear about it, as all I need is a plain white border, with the ratio of 4x6, and to fit variously sized images.

it was interesting seeing the print quality of the Officeworks photo printing system.
At 0.15c per photo on high gloss finish, in general.. was good, but the many mono photos from years ago, which were all scanned in greyscale, so there was no colour info at all in them, many of them printed out with slight green tint/tinge!? :confused013 ... weird stuff.

But with the D300 images(about 5 or 6 of them) comparing the prints directly to my what I could see of them on my screen.. spot on!(easy screen calibration huh? :D)

:)

[RuthJ]

The kodak kiosks should allow you to do what you want. Select the 4 x 6 size and then go to edit or adjustments?...there will be an option to zoom.....both + and -. Use the - option to zoom out . It will give you the whole image fit on on the 4 x6 with a white area around the non-standard proportion....hope this makes sense. You'll still have to zoom each image tho'.

[MarkChap]

Arthur,

Give faststone iMage resizer a ago, it is free and will auto add a customisable border as it processes.
Can even get a portable version that simply runs off external media (thumb drive, disk etc)

http://www.faststone.org/FSResizerDetail.htm

[arthurking83]

The kodak kiosks should allow you to do what you want. Select the 4 x 6 size and then go to edit or adjustments?...there will be an option to zoom.....both + and -. Use the - option to zoom out . .....

Yeah I did see the option to zoom in and out, but it only allowed me to zoom out to the border of the image! :confused:

I shouldn't have been so 'hasty'(read that as feral/angry/pissed/) with the system.
I couldn't even figure out how to set all the images to print twice! :o
I had to manually select each image and set the number of prints.....

I feel like a total noob now :D


Thanks for the info on FS iMage, Mark.
I have FS viewer which is coolest banana program for re-viewing a lot of images in one folder.

I'll get onto that one immediately.

[RuthJ]

Sorry, I didn't realise you wanted border all the way around..:o. You're right, it won't allow you to zoom further out than the widest image dimension.

I do a lot of the photo restoration stuff for my family and most of the pics are non standard size...I add to the image canvas using a textured canvas effect to bring them to the standard print size. You should be able to set something up using an action to set the images to an absolute final size of 6 x4 as long as they are already sized smaller than that ready for print.
Also, instead of printing for everyone, they are set up in a private set on my flickr site for family members to download at the original size and print themselves.

The colour thing...unless you go to a pro level printer, most places will print greyscale pics with a slight colour cast. I tend to avoid this by giving the pics my own colour cast...either a version of sepia or a faint split tone effect.

...I hope you don't mind me including this image to illustrate.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2522/3730945857_71f80e603c.jpg

[arthurking83]

Cool thanks for the info Ruth.

I did try to create an action in PS(CS2 for me) but I'm so green with using PS, so I needed something like that FastStone resizer, which allows you to create a border via the traditional border method or a simple resize fo the canvas too.

A lot easier to understand than PS's cryptic mesopotamian language conversion routine :p

One of the things I wanted to do was to make 'polaroid' style border, where there is usually a slightly larger border under the image, if the image is square, and the upper and sides are relatively equal.
FSSizer allows you to specify an extra dimensional shift in one or both directions for each of horizontal and vertical shifts, but not different enlargements in one or the other direction.

So far it;s ok, and I think I can do what I want with batch jobs(what I was really after) but it may take two passes to do it the way I wanted too.

Your image is indicative of what I wanted to do with many images too..

I thougth about adding sepia... but this isn't for artistic purposes, it's only for my mum to share with her ver elderly family overseas.

I'll try to post a few pics soon.