Each month this year, we’ve been adding a new pack for Pixlr Essentials & Pro members. It’s our way of saying thanks for being part of the community. We’ve been putting out a lot of overlays in the past few months, but we wanted to mix it up a bit this time around. We have a set of borders for you we’re calling “Redacted.” What will you find in there? We’ve got some very intense ones that add a strong effect to one side of a photo, but we also have some that work almost like overlays by covering either the sides of a photo or by adding an effect that spans your entire photo. We always recommend you play with opacity and maybe even mix and match them a bit, like we did with this photo:
This one above applies a broad-brush-stroke border called Blackout, which puts a bold swath of black paint on one side of an image. But we didn’t stop there. We also added Massive, which places giant floating feathers on one side of an image. We also added Television at 50%, which gives your photo a look of a static-y television set. The old pre-digital kind of static.
Some of these are positively grungy and let you add tons of atmosphere, like this one above that uses the Clone border. It turns this photo of some stairs at the beach into a spooky, Gothic looking photo. It may have been taken in Santa Cruz on a sunny day last week, but we made it look like a lost vacation photo from the Atlantic City Boardwalk in 1929.
As you can see, we love these kinds of tortured looks, and we like to add multiple effects and play with the opacity of each border. The photo at the top of this post uses the Fray border, which partly gives a torn paper look but also adds a pattern that looks a bit like pressed tin — like you might see on the interior roof of an old building. We also added the Censor border to the image, which adds a nice striped tread through your photo. As always, rotate or flip these effects to get them to work the way you want.
There are a bunch more — 25 in all — in the Redacted pack, so you should be able to find something that works great. Not a member? Sign up for a free Essentials account either from our app or at pixlr.com and get access to Redacted and all kinds of other neat premium packs.
