On Print Borders

At a workshop recently people brought all manner of prints - some printed to the edges of the paper, others had the traditional quarter inch border, some had paper which didn't match the ratio of the image, length to width so had large white areas at either end or top and bottom, a very few showed prints with a generous border - and the appearance was dramatically better. I know we want to take full use of whatever size printer we have, but for power of presentation, either as a single print or in a portfolio - a large white border sure looks a lot nicer.

Recently for the purpose of sales at the local farmers market, I have been producing prints on enhanced matte and I created an action to produce a pseudo matte, the idea being that people could drop the images right into a standard readily available document size frame o 8.5X11 inches, no matting, no trimming. I wouldn't do the fake matte for portfolios, but I would certainly use a generous border - inch and a half on 8.5X11 paper or more on 13X19 - something proportional to the image.