Printed borders

What are mat windows for?

When framing a picture, it is customary to place a mat-board between the print and the glass. The mat serves two purposes: 

1. The mat keeps the art work from touching the glass which would damage the art over time, especially under humid conditions.
2. The mat spatially separates the art from the frame and other surroundings so you can better concentrate on the art itself.

Our mounts and frames do not have glass cover so the first purpose is not an issue. It would not be good to have a mat window without glass since dust would collect on the bottom edge of the opening, so we need another method to separate the art from the surroundings.

Photo by David Elmore

Photoshop to the rescue

With Photoshop we can choose from a variety of borders, or we can leave the print borderless. Here are some of the border treatments we can apply to your print:

Borderless prints

This works well for many images and gives them a modern look. It works especially well for picture walls.

Gallery wrap

A twist on the borderless concept, the image extends around the edge of the box mount. This works great if you have enough room on the edges of your image, but if you don't when viewed from the front, it will look as if the image were cropped too much. In this case we have several options: Leave the edges white, print a solid color on the edge, or clone the background to make the edges wider.

Mat-look border

With a printed border, we can choose any color (often taken from within the image) and we can add some texture so it will look like mat board.

Vignette

Often used for portraits, we can lighten or darken the border, or make white an oval shape around the image (see example above).

Fancy borders

We can make the border look like a torn edge of paper, for example. Just let us know what you want!