White Frame

[JoelGlobal]

I have an image that I emailed for placement on canvas (EasyCanvasPrints.com) but they do not have the 
ability to provide a two inch margin on all for sides of the image.  The image is placed all the way up to
the edge of the canvas.  In discussing this with them, they explained that the 2 inch  margin (space or "frame") has to be part of the image that I upload.  It is then that the image as it appears on the canvas will APPEAR as though it has the 2 inch space around the entire image.

If  possible, I'd rather not have this 2 inch "frame" appear as white or any other color although I can settle 
if I cannot make it clear.

Does anyone have any suggestion as to 1: How to create this "frame" and 2: Mak it clear ?
As a "newbie" photoshop member, I'd appreciate any advise you can give me.

Thanks

Joel

[Chuck Uebele]

What type of files do they accept? If only jpg, then, no, you can't have transparency. You can with pngs. Frankly, I don't think it's an issue. I doubt the printer uses white ink, so white is basically just transparent. 

[JoelGlobal]

Thank you chuck.  Yes, they do accept PNG.  Could you give me a "click by click" as to how to accomplish
the 2 inch "frame"?

[Chuck Uebele]

like I said, I think this is totally unnecessary,  but if you really want to do this, you would want to change the background layer to a normal layer, by clicking on the lock icon, in the layers panel.

Then use canvas size, and expand the image by 2 inches. 

Then use save as to saves png.

[JoelGlobal]

By the way, I'm in Windows.  For some reason the followng advice did not work for me.  When I scrolled down with the "wheel" no "Transform Bounding Box" ever appeared.

1 Correct answer
Jeff Arola • Adobe Community Professional , Apr 11, 2022

Press Ctrl+T to enter transform mode, press the Alt key and scroll with the mouse wheel to make your picture smaller until you see the Transform Bounding Box. Then press the Shift key and move one of the corner handles inward to reduce the frame size.

[D Fosse]

Are you actually talking about bleed? That's the technical term for a "live" edge that will be trimmed off - or in this case wrapped around the edge - ensuring that the image extends all the way out. You always need to allow a margin for misalignment.

You need to include this extra part of the image, and then you can place crop marks to indicate what the "proper" image portion is.

If you haven't allowed for this, you need to fake it. A simple way is to copy the outer part of the image and flip it mirror-wise, and place that on the outside.

Crop marks look like this: