Layer effects - add border effect

[pfi]

Layer effects:

You can create borders with inner and outer shadow effects, but it would be nice to have a dedicated Layer effect for borders

Suggestion: Add outer border effect to add one or more borders, with width, color, shadow, corner radius (with 90degree sharp) .... adjustments for each border

 

[GarryP]

Can you give us some visual examples of the sort of things you want to be able to achieve?

[fde101]

This would be better handled by adding support for stroke offsets to the Appearance panel and allowing a choice of strokes, fills or both from the panel to be saved as partial styles which can be applied to arbitrary objects from a palette, replacing only those parts of the appearance which match what was saved to the partial style.

[pfi]

Following is a capture of the Border Effects tool in FastStone Image Viewer and an image that shows the effect.  I use Frame 1 (20,white) and Frame 2 (1,black) on 25% reduced images all the time, as it nicely frames the image (for email attachments). FastStone uses pixels for width settings.

I think that Layer effects are well suited for borders, because the effects can be copied and applied to other images, e.g.  in a collage with placed images to apply consistent frames to all the images.

[kirk23]

I loved how I could make a  randomly feathered  border with "erase"  stroke blending mode and random  stroke width at the same time In Creative House Expression   couple decades ago .    Designer is still so much behind .  Why not  have the  "erase" blending mode in here too if the soft  is already supportin it   for layers.

[Aammppaa]

@kirk23 perhaps I don't understand your comment... but strokes can have the Erase blend mode, which does allow for easy creation of ragged borders.

Can you show an image of what you are trying to create?

[kirk23]

4 minutes ago, pfi said:

Following is a capture of the Border Effects tool in FastStone Image Viewer and an image that shows the effect.  I use Frame 1 (20,white) and Frame 2 (1,black) on 25% reduced images all the time, as it nicely frames the image (for email attachments). FastStone uses pixels for width settings.

I think that Layer effects are well suited for borders, because the effects can be copied and applied to other images, e.g.  in a collage with placed images to apply consistent frames to all the images.

Those you already can do. 

[kirk23]

9 minutes ago, Aammppaa said:

@kirk23 perhaps I don't understand your comment... but strokes can have the Erase blend mode, which does allow for easy creation of ragged borders.

Can you show an image of what you are trying to create?

Can you upload an example please.   I meant  not general brush strokes  but rather  vector strokes around shapes  in Designer or  outline/ inner glow FX.   I see no erase blending mode there.   

I can do it in a separate layer and then group together    but it's a tremendous extra pain in my ...  and never saveable as a style

[Aammppaa]

As I say, I am not sure I understand exactly what you are trying to achieve... but here is a file with a few variants of erase strokes, used to create a ragged border to an image or shape.

Also... why is a separate overlaid shape such a problem in your workflow? Different ragged borders could easily be stored as Assets, and then dragged over your image, snapped into place, to add any erase border you like.

Affinity Erase Strokes.afdesign

[GarryP]

9 hours ago, pfi said:

Following is a capture of the Border Effects tool in FastStone Image Viewer and an image that shows the effect.

Attached is an example which looks like your example (as far as I can tell) using the Appearance Panel of Designer,.
To apply the same 'border' to other images just use copy and paste-style (or make a Style).

[pfi]

Thank you for the replies.

kirk23: I have tried your suggestion with outline layer effects.  I have not quite managed to get to what you are showing, especially with regards to opacity.  With practice I'm sure I get better, but I find it fiddly to get it right - and it crops the image. If alignment is set to outside or center then one has to deal with round corners - unless you crop it?

GarryP:  Is this available in Affinity Photo as well?

General comment: The image I presented was only an example and maybe I should not have used the 'inner frame' - it distracts from the topic and I use it only occasionally. I am more interested in borders.

I am an Affinity Photo novice and I am still struggling with a lot of things in Affinity.  I know, I am only scratching the surface of Affinity's capabilities with how I want to use it - namely photo editing (plus borders, I guess?!). Watching YouTube videos, it seems that there are many ways to create borders, but non of them seem straight forward or as effective, but rather complicated.

To me, it would be nice to simply have options that do what they say, and do them well, like adding borders, vignetting, <regular tasks> etc. instead of trying to figure out so many workarounds.

(Though this is off the topic, but vignetting is another one of those tasks. As is, the vignetting filter is not very usable when it comes to moving the center or rotating the vignette - and I find it awkward to use. There are other ways to applying a nice vignette, but you have to understand so many other things before you can comfortable apply a vignette - why does the 'vignette filter' not do that?  btw. can you create presets for life filters?)

[GarryP]

12 minutes ago, pfi said:

GarryP:  Is this available in Affinity Photo as well?

The Appearance Panel is only available in Designer. (You didn’t say which application(s) you had available or wanted to use.)

13 minutes ago, pfi said:

The image I presented was only an example and maybe I should not have used the 'inner frame' - it distracts from the topic and I use it only occasionally.

Can you show us an example of what you actually want to create?

13 minutes ago, pfi said:

To me, it would be nice to simply have options that do what they say, and do them well, like adding borders, vignetting, <regular tasks> etc. instead of trying to figure out so many workarounds.

It’s not really a question of ‘workarounds’; it’s more about learning to do some things differently as not all software works the same.
 

13 minutes ago, pfi said:

There are other ways to applying a nice vignette, but you have to understand so many other things before you can comfortable apply a vignette - why does the 'vignette filter' not do that?

I gave you a way to create all kinds of vignettes in your other thread about that issue:

Once you understand the basics then you should be able to do this sort of thing very easily.

[pfi]

Thanks for your feedback. You are right, I forgot to mention the product in most/all of my first posts on this forum. Although, in this post the product is mentioned in the signature.

Usage: For a photo book, I'd like to create a sequence of collages on, for example, a 12x12inch, 300dpi document, place photos and then give every photo the same border.  I played around with that a couple of weeks ago and I add 3 examples below - all done in Affinity Photo. Copying and pasting layer effects from one layer (photo) to another is the easy part, just creating a simple border (e.g. as shown in example 4 & 5),  I found difficult to do.

That is the idea, but you are also right, it is a matter of learning something new working with a different application.  Still, the more I think about it, providing 'Borders' as layer effects would be a great addition.

[Pšenda]

7 hours ago, pfi said:

Still, the more I think about it, providing 'Borders' as layer effects would be a great addition.

My personal preference - a photo is either good or bad, and then no frame can save it. It's usually the other way around, that even a relatively good photo can be ruined by an ugly frame. I'm sorry, but I personally find most of your frame samples harmful, so I would use them very carefully (or preferably not at all).

Of course, APhoto could have some better tools for creating frames, but generators of thousands of types of frames and various "cool" effects belong in my opinion to applications for mobile phones, in our country are called "fotokurvítka" (photobutcher?) 🙂

[pfi]

Thanks Psenda,  I agree.

In fact I had to laugh, because the three collages above are awful - this is not my style.  As I said, I am a Affinity Photo beginner and all I wanted was to see how I can use Affinity to create collages, and create borders around images. So I got a few random photos, randomly placed them on a canvas and then (after watching a few Affinity YouTubes) used layer effects to create borders. It was an interesting exercise, but I could not simply do what I had in mind, which is the whole reason for this post.

I think a clean, simple border can nicely tidy up the edges of an image and/or blend it nicely into a background.

[GarryP]

Putting fancy borders on images is something which isn’t normally done for web or print these days, unless you are going for a specific look.

Have a look in any magazine that you can buy and count the number of images which have a fancy border.
Unless it’s a magazine which has a specific house style, I’m guessing that there will be very few.

It was something which was done a while back because the tools to do it were new and ‘cool’ at the time but it’s generally fallen by the wayside in much the same way as multi-colour scrolling and flashing text on web pages did.

As mentioned above, adding a border to a good image won’t generally improve it and could actually spoil it.
And adding a border to a bad image won’t generally improve it.

If you want to give some extra ‘interest’ to an image, one which may not be as good as you might like for some reason, then one possibility (at a push) would be to clip it inside a shape.

For example, in my attached (deliberately made bad) mock-up, the ‘photographer’ didn’t get the bird properly in shot and the image is blurred.
However, the image has been clipped in the shape and it now looks a little bit more like it was a deliberate ‘style’ choice – just a bit of something to give the page a bit of colour and shape, but nothing that the reader need concern themselves with.

[pfi]

I appreciate the feedback and I am considering what you are saying.  I had a look at my photo books, and I have to agree that I have often overused borders. No borders on some landscape photos would have done them a favor.

But, depending what genre it is, like family photos and others, borders have their place. I am happy with a lot what I have done, though in some cases I should have applied borders more subtly?!

 

Unfortunately, I have chosen really stupid examples, which have demonstrated capabilities, rather than what I am after, and the whole post got sidetracked.

I still think there is a place for borders in layer effects. It is obviously up to the user, if and how he wants to use it - just like all the other effects (options - right?).  This is probably no different when you consider how powerful Affinity Photo is.  I can easily imagine that, say, 30%+ of Affinity's capabilities are very seldom used, and maybe only by 5% of users.  And now that I had time to look closer (i.e. google and Affinity Forums) the request for borders keeps coming up, and many solutions are offered, but none of them are that intuitive and all seem to require extra effort.

As a newbie, and amateur photographer,  I have learned a lot through this post and it's been an interesting journey - thanks for everyone for time and effort to help out.

[GarryP]

If you – or anyone else – want to use borders, of any kind, for your photos then that’s absolutely fine; they’re your photos and you can make them look however you want them to look.

I can see why some people might want to have some extra ‘border functionality’ and I don’t have any problem with that but, in the meantime, while we are waiting, and that could be a very long wait, all we can do is suggest alternative techniques.

As I said in my first reply in this thread, if you can supply an example of something you want to make then we can probably help you to find a way to get what you want, somehow.