Creating a vignette (or feathered edges)

Once you do it once or twice, it becomes one of the easiest things to do!

First, I've included the whole desktop so you can see two things:
1: Feather (underlined twice on top) is set at 20pixels or so.
2: Select a marquee, either rectangular or circular (as the arrow points to)

2: Draw a square (or oval or circle) around the area you want to feather away.
Make sure you leave plenty of room to feather!

The corners should then round for square marquees, as shown below:

Then Select > Inverse (or Control+Shift+I), and hit delete.
If you want the back to be a different color than white, change the background color.
The background color is here:

As shown, the foreground is black, background is white.

This is how the picture will look when you hit delete. Depending on the size of the picture,
the amount you selected for a feather size, and how much of the area you selected,
your picture may look different from mine.

But look closely!! If you put this picture on a white background, there are still
definite lines around it. The goal of a vignette is to make it look very smooth
around the edges.

So when the edges were still selected, I just hit delete again to delete some more. Now the edges are gone.

And then, to make it look seamless on this background, I chose the background
color to match this background, and deleted. The finished product:

As I said before, once you do it once or twice, it becomes one of the easiest things to do in Photoshop!
Marquee, select inverse, delete!

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Tinting | What Some Tools Do | Type Mask | Stitching | Vignette