White Border When Cropping

To add white borders to my photos I usually run this action via Bridge>Photoshop>Batch on RAWS when I am not cropping:

1) Open RAW
2) Add a 3% White border via the canvas size dialogue
3) Downsample to whatever resolution I want to print at
4) Convert to JPG

But how do you do this (manually) if you are cropping? One option I suppose is to:
1) Divide desired dimensions by 1.03
2) Crop using these dimensions. For example for 6x4, I would crop at 5.82524271844660194174​7572815534" X 3.88349514563106796116​50485436893" @300dpi
3) Add 3% white border via canvas size


That way I end up with a 6x4@ 300dpi with a 3% white border

Is there a better way? Am I overcomplicating this?

That seems a tad on the complicated side to me. There is alot of numbers there, are you really using them all.

If you want to end up with a 4x6 print. I think most times the white border is 1/8th of an inch on all sides. When you are cropping or resizing do it to 5.75 X 3.75 and then do your image - canvas size and set it to 6X4 make sure your color is set to white, and make sure to untag relative and it should work fine. This could be built into an action pretty easily.

I don't know if this is any quicker but there isn't a whole lot of math involved to it. Of course if you wanted a larger or smaller border to you just your original crop size.

I think the OP's point is that a 1/8th inch border changes the aspect ratio. 6"x4" has an aspect ratiop of 1.500. 5.75" x 3.75" has an aspect ratio of 1.533 - so the image would need to be cropped to a different shape befoire adding the border. On the other hand a 3% border doesn't change the aspect ratio.

However, it's not really necessary to crop to 5.82524271844660194174​7572815534" X 3.88349514563106796116​50485436893". If you cropped to 5.825" x 3.883", that will give the same result to the nearest pixel. And it's a lot easier - just imagine what would happen if you accidentally typed 5.82524278144660194174​7572815534" instead of 5.82524271844660194174​7572815534"!

I think the OP's point is that a 1/8th inch border changes the aspect ratio. 6"x4" has an aspect ratiop of 1.500. 5.75" x 3.75" has an aspect ratio of 1.533 - so the image would need to be cropped to a different shape befoire adding the border. On the other hand a 3% border doesn't change the aspect ratio.

However, it's not really necessary to crop to 5.82524271844660194174​7572815534" X 3.88349514563106796116​50485436893". If you cropped to 5.825" x 3.883", that will give the same result to the nearest pixel. And it's a lot easier - just imagine what would happen if you accidentally typed 5.82524278144660194174​7572815534" instead of 5.82524271844660194174​7572815534"!

[EDIT - Sorry for double post - browser glitch!]