How to create a Dashed Border?

[töff]

Well, I hope I don't come off as an absolute ogre here, but I think this is the sort of basic technique that all Photoshoppers rely upon on a regular basis, and you would benefit greatly from experimenting on your own to create this imagery, rather than following a tutorial. Teach a man to fish is one thing, but point him toward a river is another.

There are probably easily a dozen ways to achieve this particular effect. I think you ought to be able to come up with at least two at the newbie level.

Edit: Furthermore, throwing oneself into the river is how all the amazing guys here come up with their original awesome advanced techniques to share with others. You must never be afraid to hurl yourself into the water, head first! It's not as if you'll break your neck on a rock. Okay, I've ridden that metaphor into the ground now.

[Sigurd]

You want to find a method that draws the border once with an interrupted stroke. Look at the structure of your brush and see if you can reduce the frequency of the dots until you break up the line.

Make sure you keep the borders on a separate layer. Keeps everything clear and allows you to have a version with and without borders.

In photoshop you likely want a dotted brush and then trace a work path with that brush.

In Illustrator its much the same.


Sigurd


Oh and what töff said is true. Try not to think of it as a problem but as a puzzle to solve.

[Ascension]

You can do the dotted border by setting the spacing on your pencil tip (not brush) to 150% or more. For a dashed line you need a few steps:

1. Make a path with the pen tool.
2. Pick any pencil tip that you want but set the spacing to 1%.
3. Stroke the path.
4. Click on the eraser tool and at the top set it to pencil mode.
5. Use a hard square pencil tip that is exactly double the size of the pencil tip you used to make the line.
6. Click on the brush editor and set the spacing to 300% or more and set the angle jitter control to direction.
7. Stroke the path with this modified eraser and delete the path when done (if you want).

The two most important things here are the spacing and the direction control on the eraser...otherwise the results will be unpredictable. If you were to make your own brush tip in a rectangular shape it won't work either (it doesn't bend around curves, I've tried, so that's why I use a hard round pencil tip to draw the line and a square to erase holes out of it). By the way, I use CS as well so I know this works.