*** From the Archives ***

This article is from June 25, 2012, and is no longer current.

How to Add a Border to an Image in Illustrator

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Excerpted from Deke’s Techniques on lynda.com.

“It’s sooo simple…once you know the trick.”

How many times have you heard (or said that) regarding some strange, quirky obstacle that stood in the way of you getting your work done? All applications can act a little weird at times, when they refuse to perform a seemingly simple task. You can waste hours and tear your hair out, clicking around in vain for the right button.

Case in point: try to apply a border to a photograph that you place into Adobe Illustrator. This should take two seconds, right? Well it doesn’t take much longer than that…if you know the secret (which bizarrely involves a trip to the Effect menu).

In the latest episode of Deke’s Techniques, Deke McClelland reveals the trick, which you can also use to apply a fill color to tint a placed photograph.

Visit Deke’s Techniques for more Photoshop and Illustrator creative how-to projects in 10-minutes or less.

Editor in Chief of CreativePro. Instructor at LinkedIn Learning with courses on InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, GIMP, Inkscape, and Affinity Publisher.
  • Anonymous says:

    hmm..I hit the mask button and apply a stroke like I would any object.

  • Anonymous says:

    Wow… this is so not intuitive. Thanks so much for posting this!

  • Anonymous says:

    AI has some serious problems with borders. There must be an easier way to apply a border to an image. I tried the techniques from the video and they did not work. Only after multiple tries using different commands did I actually apply a border to an image.

  • Sergio Sala says:

    Thanks, it was a life-saver!

  • Pekka says:

    Just what I needed, thank you!

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