Creating two borders around an image

[nieee]

I'll tell you upfront that I am a total newbie to Indesign but here is my problem. I'm trying to create double border around a graphic. I want an even white border immediately surrounding the image, say 12 points on all sides, and then a 6 point black border(stroke) around that.

I've tried applying the stroke and then scaling the image but that creates a proportional white space which looks bad on images with a high aspect ratio.

When I apply an outside stroke and then "fit content to frame" it expands the image to the outside edge of the new stroke. But when I do the same thing with inside alignment, the image is expanded as if I had applied outside alignment. This I don't understand except it doesn't do what I want.

I have a lot of images to apply borders to so I'm trying to find an efficient way to do it. Any suggestions?

Thanks.

 

[eugenetyson]

Window>Stroke

It brings up the panel

Choose Align Outside

As for double strokes, that's a little trickier

You can make a new stroke from the same panel, using the fly arrow. You can make it in percentages, so you'll have to work them out yourself. But you can get pretty good different weight strokes in creating your own.

 

[apepp]

...yep, something close can be achieved by making a new stroke from the flyout menu of the stroke palette > stroke styles > new...

...change to stripe mode, move the bottom bar to zero %...

...move top bar to say 30%...

...align stroke to outside...

...change gap color to white...

...you can create an object style (window > object styles) from your created test frame, that can then be applied to other frames in one hit (shift select), change the object style and they will all change...

Andrew

 

[nieee]

Thanks for the help guys. I figured out my problem last night. In the object style options-frame fitting options I was playing around with the crop amount. I adjusted it up and down but could see nothing happening in the preview window so left it at +1/8". Later when I tried to fit the content to the frame, it kept making it 1/8" bigger and I couldn't figure out why. Duh!
Now I set the crop amount to -1/8" with a simple black stroke border and the pick "fit content to frame" and I get a nice even white space with a black border outside.
After reading your posts, I also made a new stroke and can get the same results.

Thanks again!
Christoph