It is well known amongst photographers that the surround of a photograph can greatly change or enhance the effect of a particular photo. Simply by mounting a photo with a particular colour (usually white or black works best) can focus the viewers attention on your subject matter, improving their viewing experience.
One of the most common and simplist ways to achieve this is to add letter boxing to your photos.Letter boxing is a term to describe black bands across the top and bottom of an image, similar to what you would see when viewing a film in wide screen.
Adding letter boxing to your photographs can give them a real cinematic feel. Doing this in photoshop is incredibly easy.
How to Add Letter Boxing
Adding letter boxing is relatively straight forward to do in Photoshop. Here is our quick guide to getting this effect:
1. Image Menu > Canvas Size
2. Select to adjust the height using percent instead of pixels
3. Change the Height to 40 (40%)
4. Set the extension colour to black
5. Hit ok and your image should now have black letter boxing at the top and bottom!
Of course by adding letter boxing to your photograph you’ll be changing the aspect ratio. To keep the same aspect ratio you will need to first crop your image before adding on the letter boxing. You can try and be precise about this however I usually crop the height a bit to get that wide screen look.
Also I usually end up playing around with the height (40% in the photo above) until I get the right look and feel. This tends to vary from photo to photo.
Enjoy this article? If so please subscribe to Digital SLR Guru to receive free updates!
Loading ...