Put a Stroke Around Something on My Layer?

There are two ways: The way I most often do it is to go to the Layers panel, press-and-hold the Command (PC: Ctrl) key, and click directly on the layer’s thumbnail. This puts a selection around anything on that layer. Once that selection is in place, I go under the Edit menu and choose Stroke. This brings up the Stroke dialog (seen above left) that lets you choose how thick you want this stroke, the color, and the location of where you want it placed (I normally choose Center, so the stroke is half outside the selection and half inside). Click OK and it applies the stroke, but then you’ll need to deselect by pressing Command-D (PC: Ctrl-D). The second method is to apply a layer style to the entire layer, and anything on that layer gets an editable stroke. Click on the Add a Layer Style icon at the bottom of the Layers panel, choose Stroke, and it brings up the Stroke options in the Layer Style dialog, where you can choose how you want the stroke to look. It now treats that stroke pretty much the same way it would treat a drop shadow you added the same way—you can remove it, hide it from view, and so on, the same way (see page 134).