Strokin’ your competition Prints
Paul Rogers, M.Photog.Cr, CPP, F-PPANI, ASP

Are you interested in taking your competition prints to the next level? If you answered yes than this article should help
you get there. Let’s take a second and get a quick refresher on the 12 elements of a competition print. Impact, Creativity, Style, Composition, Print Presentation, Center of Interest, Lighting, Subject Matter, Technical Excellence, Technique, Storytelling Having worked on print crews and sat on a few local judging panels, one of the things that I notice is that a lot of photographers (and I used to be one of them) think that they need to fill the whole 16x20 board with the image. This is not true, we can make our images pretty much any size and shape as long as it is placed in a 16x20 print for presentation.
Photographers with their Masters degrees have a little more flexibility when it comes to the size, but this shouldn’t keep
us from printing everything full frame. This set of examples will take you from an image captured straight from camera, to how it can be placed into a 16x20 format.

The second example is after I finished the artwork and applied my choice of crop. I then moved the images onto a 16x20 canvas and placed it in the upper right third of the image. The background color of the mat was selected from the image using the eyedropper tool. The next thing I needed to do place a stroke around the image and show some separation from the background.

There are two places that you can find a way to stroke your image. One is in your layer styles (Click on Layer > Layer
Style > Stroke), this is a good tool to use if you are using just one color in your stroke. Before we get to the other way to
stroke your image, we need to make a selection of the layer we want to stroke. The simplest way to do this is to go to
your layers palette and place your cursor over the layer thumbnail that you are going to stroke, while holding down
the ctrl key (cmd key for MAC users) click on the thumbnail and you should see a selection of marching ants around the
layer you want to stroke. The example I will be using is a stroke found in your Edit menu (Edit > Stroke). When you
click on the stroke tab a dialog box will open and you will have some choices to make. The first choice is the width of
the stroke and I chose 25 pixels for this example, my color selection was the same as the background and I wanted to
stroke the inside of the image. My blending mode was Normal at 100%. I then repeated the same process again only
this time my width was only 10 pixels and my color was selected from the image. You want to make sure that the
color you choose for the second stroke compliments the image and is not too bright to where it distracts your eye
away from the image. And this completes the process. As we look back up at the 12 elements that a competition
print is judged on, I would say that we enhanced 8 of those elements and gave us a better chance at receiving a merit.