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Make a new image that's 400x400 pixels wide and high. This will be our base. Make the background colour white and then click OK and you'll have your new image. This guide will show you how create smooth banners using feathering. Feathering, however, can be used for anything, not just banners.
There are actually four pictures in our banner, all feathered nicely together using feathering. Without feathering a lot of banners would lose appeal and therefore ruin your site's image. Anyways, select two or three images you like which could all cover the 400x400 canvas. I'm using two of our Advent Children scans as they look cool. When you've got your images open, select one of them. Copy it by selecting it (CTRL+A) and then pressing CTRL+C to copy it to the clipboard.
You may find that the image seems rather large, which in my case, quite so. So resize it to about 400x400, if you can, or as near to that as you can manage. Then press 'CTRL+V' in your 400x400 feathering image and it'll paste the image onto the screen. Now we want to go back to our second image and do exactly the same (CTRL+A then CTRL+C) and paste it into our feathering image by pressing CTRL+V. Both these images should be on seperate layers to the background and each other, like this:
Notice that you can clearly see the 'Transparent' texture behind the two images... the two images need to be on a blank, seperate layer in order to feather, else you'll just be blurring them. When you're sure they're on two different layers, resume. If not, then read again. If your Photoshop is an older version to what I'm using (which is 7.0) then it may be different, in which case you'll need to create a new layer then paste the image.
Now that we've got our two images on seperate layers, we can begin feathering. Feathering is like an art, really. With practice, you'll become better and better at it. One thing that you must remember when Feathering is it's a very powerful tool and I surprise myself with what can be done with it.
The smaller the feather, the finer the edging on your selection. The higher the feather and the smoother the fading you get. It's an excellent tool. Right, so here's how you feather. Go to the top layer of your image. Make a selection using the Rectangular Marquee tool of about half the image and the blank canvas on that layer. I shuffled my images around a bit, like so:
Once you've made your selection, it should look something like this:
With your selection looking something like that, go to the toolbar at the top of your screen and go to 'Select' and open the dropdown box. Move your mouse pointer down to 'Feather' and click it to open up the Feather box. Put in '25' as your feather radius.
Now you should have something like... well, exactly the same. It shouldn't have changed a great deal, only your selection getting a little bigger. This is all perfectly normal. The next part is impressive, you'll agree. Just hit 'Delete' once and you've feathered this layer. It's really that simple.
You can see in the image above that it's changed dramatically. Feathering can be used in this method for almost anything. I use it for text and other various implications to images in Photoshop. Don't abuse feathering, as too much in one image looks quite rubbish. You could even try ranging the feathering range. If you draw around a character or something then a better feather would be something between 1 and 5.
This would give a nice, smooth, crisp finish. When making banners, use higher numbers to get a better fade between the images. Notice you only have to feather one layer? Try it with multiple images and, as always, practice. Go through this tutorial several times and change some of your methods. Learn what different effects you can get, and even try it out without the tutorial... the more you practice feathering, the better you will become in it, I assure you. Here is my finished picture:
Last Updated Saturday, October 11th, 2008
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