Gimp Tutorial: Making Borders For Banners & Graphics

To start, open GIMP - here's the image window:

Select "File" then "New..."

Choose a size, I'm going for 250 x 300 for this image:

Select "All" from the "Select" Menu:

Now you can Select "Border":

Choose how thick you want your border, I'm going to use 10 pixels:

For what I'm going to make, I want an orange border, so I'm going to select the "Bucket Fill" icon in my Toolbox, on the left:

Then open the "Color Selection" dialog:

Choose my color:

After I click "Done" I can see that the Color Selection box is now the color I just selected:

Now I just click on any part of the border, which is still selected, and the orange completely fills it in:

Don't worry if you make a mistake, it's easy to un-do anything until you save it:

If you are happy with the white background, skip to the next section. If not, this is a perfect time to do something about it

Choose a new color from the Toolbox, then choose "Invert" under "Selection" in the image window:

Click the center of the image, and it fills with the color I selected:

Under "File" in the image window, select "Save" or "Save As..." since this is a new file, it will automatically ask you for a name, but I always select "Save As..." because it's easier for me to just do that every time, than risk ruining an original when working on other projects.

Choose your location, type in a name and click "Save"

If you use the ".jpg" extension, the "Save as JEPG" dialog will open. For me, the most important thing is to choose the Quality. I always go for 100%, but you can leave it at 85%, or even go lower.

Some pictures won't suffer much from using the lower quality options, and if space or bandwidth are issues, the lower option may actually be a better choice, but as I'm planning on this being the building block of future images, and it's really not that big right now, I'll save it at 100%.

It looks a bit different if you decide to save it as a GIF file:

When the "Export File" dialog pops up, I just let it export it using the default settings. It can be done manually by selecting "Mode" under "Image" in the image window, but I haven't experimented with that yet, the default settings work fine for what I'm currently doing.

Just before saving the file as a GIF, you'll be given some final options, you can select "Interlace" which allows a user to stop the image from fully loading when it's on a web page. You can add a signature, or comments in the "GIF Comment" box.

Since this isn't animated, that section will be disabled:

Finally, if you do not give GIMP and extension, it will automatically save it as the default GIMP ".xcf" format (I've manually typed it in here):

To me, it's best to save things like this in all three formats. You can't use it on the web as a ".xcf" file, but at the very least save a copy in ".xcf" so you can easily use it in the future.

I also do that with finished projects so I can easily change them later, instead of starting over from scratch.

From this comparison, you might be able to see that the XCF file on top still has the center field selected, and the JPEG underneath does not:

It's not impossible to work with the JPEG, but it is much easier to work with the XCF. Just by inverting the selection, I can easily change just the color in the border field (if you didn't invert and fill in the color field before, you won't have to invert it now). With the JPEG file, I would have to isolate the orange color from the rest of the image using one of the selection tools to be able to change it.

Also, the XCF file isn't an exported or hasn't been converted to another format, so it will just look better after you've worked on it. It can be converted to something after you've worked on it, so you can use elsewhere.

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Gimp Tutorial:
Making Borders For Banners & Graphics
by CleanerLife
is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0
United States License.