Without Soft Edge Border
With Soft Edge Border
This tutorial is to help you learn how to give a photo a soft edge. This technique is mainly used for collages, but it can also be used for displays, reports, or just to make a picture more pleasing to the eye. Once you have your photo open in photoshop:
1. Select either the Rectangular Marquee Tool or the Elliptical Marquee Tool. For this example I used the Elliptical Marquee Tool.
2. Make a good sized selection around what you want in the final product. Allow a little extra room as well to create enough space for the soft edge so you won’t lose some of what you would like to keep.
3. Then choose Feather under the Select Menu. (Select>Feather). For this photo I entered 45 pixels, you may wish to choose a different amount.
4. Then Copy that selection (Edit>Copy)
5. Make a new document (File>New)
6. Paste the selection into the new document (Edit>Paste).
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6 Comments
This is very useful!!!
I looked all over the internet for simple instructions on how to put a soft edge on a photo and yours hit the mark after a lengthy search. Thank you so much!!
I agree with Sarah. Thank you.
Ditto!
Thank you for making this exercise easy to understand and simple to do. Your instructions are clear, and the images helped tremendously.
Hey! Wow! That was waaaaaayyyyyy too easy. I had been sitting here, watching political crap on MSNBC, and fiddling with Photoshop for more than an hour when I decided to Google the problem… and here was the answer.
Thanks, man.
Karl A. Krogmann
THANKYOU so much this article was wonderful, I read about 5 before finding this one and yours is by far the best.