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After enlarging the canvas I used the marquee tool to outline a square in the image. The outline can be seen below and makes a characteristic moving row of dashes called Marching Ants.  I then copied my selection and then pasted it as a new layer so that I had the original background layer of the image with a border as well as a layer with the image with an invisible border (2 layers). I then made a new invisible layer (this one is completely invisible) so that makes 3 layers total so far. You will need to be sure to move the layers so that the new completely invisible layer is the middle layer. As you go along you may have to make the upper layer (which is the layer that has the copied image with an invisible border) invisible from time to time. I'm sure you have no idea of what I'm doing so just bear with me and follow along! Just remember, we now have these 3 layers:
Once I have the 3 layers described above I made the completely invisible layer active. I should still have those marching ants dancing about and they will now be marching about on the active invisible layer. I then paint bucketed inside the marching ants so that I now have a big black square.  I expanded the marching ants border by 10 pixels (you can expand this layer to any size you want, I just chose 10 pixels for this example) and then paint bucketed inside the marching ants border again. I could have just expanded the marching ants border before ever doing the paint bucket but I thought I'd add in this extra step so you'd be a little more clear on what I'm doing. Remember, we still have 3 layers with the black square layer active. Once I was satisfied with how my black square layer looked I deselected the image so that the marching ants disappeared.  |