Photoshop question

[Fourth and 8]

Say you want to fade a photo's edge into the copy. How do you do it? I can't watch the design czar who teaches nothing. Give me a step by step on a photoshop/quark combo and I'll email a beer.

 

[Chi City 81]

I know Photoshop pretty damned well, but I don't know what you're trying to do. Can you describe it differently, please? Are you talking about a cutout? About a gradient fade?

 

[Oggiedoggie]

One, rather crude but simple, way is to use the marquee selection tool (that square dotted-line thingy) to make a square well within the photo's borders. You'll get the "marching ants" around that square.

Then go up to "select" at the top of the window and scroll down to "inverse."

Then go back to "select" and scroll down to "feather." Choose a rather large value for the feather (>50 depending on the size of the photo).

Make sure that your background color is white and hit "delete" on the keyboard.

The edges should now do a fuzzy fade to white.

Experiment with the marquee placement and the feather value until you get what you want.

You can also experiment with the eraser tool set on a wide brush diameter and with the "hardness" of the brush set at "0". Just run the eraser around the edge of the photo. Then your fade lines don't necessarily have to be straight and you can work more freehand.

In any case, leave the "history" window open so that you can go back to an earlier version of the file if you don't like the effect.

And, as always, think twice as much about why you are altering the photo as you do about how to do it.

Then, in Quark, just make sure the background of the text box is transparent or "none" and place the type where you want on the edge of the photo.

This is for a photo that fades on all edges. To fade one edge simply reposition the marquee box so that only one edge is selected before you feather and delete.

I think the best way to fade one edge is to use the gradient mask function to build a gradient fill on a layer that can be adjusted. That's more complicated than I want to type.

 

[captzulu]

A quick & effective way is to put a layer on top of the layer with your photo, and fill that top layer with a transparent-to-white gradient.

1. Open the photo in photoshop, create a new layer (we'll call it "gradient layer")

2. Set your foreground color to white.

3. Select the gradient tool. In the tool options bar across the top, click on the dropdown menu of preset gradients. Pick "Foreground to transparent". Then, next to the dropdown menu, make sure you have "linear gradient" selected (the white-to-black icon).

4. Make sure you are working on your gradient layer. Position your gradient tool near whichever edge of the photo you want to fade and click and drag toward the other side (hold Shift to drag in a straight line). So if you want the bottom of the photo to fade into white, you would start from near the bottom edge and drag up. Everything beyond the point where you start would be completely white, and everything to the other side of the point where you stop would be completely visible.

5. The advantage of having the gradient on its own layer is that if you need to make small tweaks to where it starts and stops, you can just hit Ctrl-T to bring up free transform and scale the gradient layer to your liking.

If you need to fade more than one edge, you can add additional layers and repeat steps 2-4.

Once you're happy with it, do Layer-Flatten Image and save it as whatever output format you use.