Today’s Question: I wanted to add a stroke border around an image [in Photoshop] as a creative touch, which I’ve done before. However, no matter what settings I use, the stroke border never appears on the image.
Tim’s Quick Answer: It sounds like the image was cropped in Photoshop without deleting pixels, causing the stroke effect to be added at the outer edge of the photo that is hidden from view. I suggest adding a layer mask based on the current crop to cause the stroke border to come into view.
More Detail: When you add a stroke layer effect to an image layer in Photoshop, it is placed at the outer edge of the image layer. If that outer edge is outside the visible canvas area, such as because the image was cropped non-destructively, the stroke will be positioned outside the visible image area.
You could crop destructively to resolve this issue, but I don’t recommend that. This would involve, for example, turning on the “Delete Cropped Pixels” checkbox on the Options bar for the Crop tool. However, I recommend keeping that checkbox turned off so you can always recover the cropped portion of the image should you decide that is necessary later.
Instead, I recommend adding a layer mask to the image layer you’ve added the stroke to based on the current crop of the image. To do so, choose Edit > Select All from the menu to create a selection of the full image based on the current crop. Then select the image layer with the stroke effect on the Layers panel and click the “Add Layer Mask” button (the circle inside a rectangle icon) at the bottom of the panel.
With this layer mask added, the stroke effect will appear at the outer boundary of the image based on the setting you used. Just be sure to select the “Inside” option from the Position popup for the stroke so it will appear inside the visible image area.
To add a stroke border, by the way, you can select an image layer (if it is the Background image layer you need to double-click its thumbnail on the Layers panel to convert it to a normal layer), then click the “Add a Layer Style” button (the “fx” icon) at the bottom of the Layers panel and choose “Stroke” from the popup. Configure the settings in the Layer Style dialog and click OK to add the stroke border.
