First set your guides like in the Beginner Borders tutorial.

Then use the Polygonal Lasso to create a selection around your panels. You can do one panel at a time or you can do them all at once, it’s up to you. Since the Lasso will snap to the guides, this part should go really quickly.

Stroke the selection and choose Inside. Outside and center will give you crappy corners, so make sure you choose inside.

Also, make sure you don’t draw a border around panels that go right up to the edge of the page. This is covered in the Beginner tutorial if you don’t understand what I mean. When using the Polygon Lasso, you can actually click in the ruler or the scroll bar to place a point off the page.

I honestly think that this method is better than the Beginner method, but I also think it’s slightly more complicated. That’s why I’m saving it for after you can do perfect borders. Better to start off simple and start off right, ne?

One thing to keep in mind is whether or not your group has anti-aliased borders. M7 works on full-size raws and then resizes, so the borders become anti-aliased. TMI works on resized raws, so the borders are NOT anti-aliased.

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As always, create a new layer for your borders!!

If your group does not use anti-aliased borders, make sure you hold down SHIFT so that the horizontal and vertical lines are perfectly straight!

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Also, be sure that your border is straight and does not have visible “steps” in the line. Borders must appear completely straight!

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Avoid this.

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If a panel goes right to the edge of the page, that side does NOT get a border. When using the Lasso on panels like this, make sure you don’t get any border on those sides!

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1. Borders must be straight. This may seem like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised.
2. Borders must be a constant width. Simple again, right?
3. Borders must have sharp 90° corners (unless one of the lines is diagonal).

As always, different groups will have different parameters for their scanlations. For Shannaro, we had 2 px border lines on a 1200 px high raw. For M7, we have 8 px lines on a 3600 px high raw that gets resized. Regardless, the three rules stated above will apply to virtually every group.

PENCIL TOOL & PAINT BUCKET METHOD (WITH GUIDES)

To me, this is a conceptually very simple method, and the guides will assure accuracy.

1) MAKE A NEW LAYER FOR YOUR BORDERS.

2) Use guides to determine where you want your borders to be. Click on the ruler that’s at the top or left side of the page and hold the button down as you drag the cursor onto the page. You’ll see a dotted line appear, which will turn blue when you let go of the mouse button. If you don’t see a ruler, press CTRL-R (Command-R for Macs).

Place a guide for every border you’re going to draw. To move a guide, use the Move Tool and drag it exactly where you want it.

No page will ever have perfectly aligned borders, so don’t worry if you have to clip off a few pixels from the panels. Try to keep the raw borders outside the guides.

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3) Choose the Pencil Tool and set the width to whatever your group’s standard is (e.g. 3 pixels wide). Make sure you’re on your Borders Layer!!!

4) Start at one corner of a panel border, hold down the Shift key, and draw a straight line along the border. Your Pencil Tool will snap to the guides, so this process should be pretty quick and painless. Do that for all the vertical and horizontal borders.

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[/spoiler]See how the raw border is on the outside of my red border line? You will lose a few pixels from the image with this method. If you are clipping too much from the panel, try rotating the page differently to straighten it out. Sometimes, correcting for one border will screw up another. Do the best you can.

*** If you have a DIAGONAL panel border, use the Line Tool set to the appropriate width and make sure there is a check in the box for anti-aliasing.

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Note that you can still set a guide for each end of the diagonal line.

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5) Once you have redrawn all of the panel borders, select the Paint Bucket Tool, and make sure “Contiguous” and “Anti-aliased” are checked on the toolbar at the top. Now dump white in the space between the borders you just drew.

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Notice the area outside the borders is perfectly white with the raw border and all the dust and dirt covered.

6) If you covered over any SFX or speech bubbles, you’ll have to erase that part of the border with the Eraser Tool. Set the opacity of the border layer to 75% so you can see which areas need to be erased.

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Top left: The border layer is covering the SFX.
Top right: Reduce the opacity of the border layer.
Bottom left: Erase the border area covering the SFX.
Bottom right: Restore the opacity of the border layer to 100%
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Also, if a panel goes right to the edge of a page, it does NOT get a border.

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After thinking long and hard, I decided that this was the quickest method for doing borders with the least chance for messing up. Also, it should work for pretty much everyone regardless of your group’s requirements.

If your group uses a border 4 px or wider, there may be gaps left in the corners since the 4 px Pencil brush looks like a + instead of a square. Just go back and add the missing pixels with the Pencil at 3 px.

Or if you’re feeling daring, you can make a square-shaped brush just for doing borders (my Bleach border brush is 8 px by 8 px). When I have time, I’ll put up a short guide for making custom Photoshop brushes since it’s so insanely easy…