Fading Away

I've never done that either... anxious to hear the answer.
(my 4wd is broke too)

 

I assume that there is a fair amount of overlap between the two image layers? If that's the case on the top layer of the two you would like to blend together (make sure you select this layer in the layer palette) you need to reveal a layer mask (a submenu on the layers menu). If you do this, the activated layer should show a black box to its right in the palette. You should also see that the black box has an indicator showing that it's actually active and not the image. At this point, in your normal drawing area, use your marquee (square selector box thingee) too to draw a box representing the area that you want your blend to occur. From there, in the marqueed selection, fill with a gradient from 100 K to 0 K. If it looks completely wrong, draw the gradient in the opposite direction. The start and finish of the gradient should be in only the areas where both of the layered images have data.

This is from memory so you may have to play.

Rob

 

Okay - here is a Photoshop 7 step-by-step complete with pix.

1. Make sure each photo is on a seperate layer. Put the picture you want to fade on top. Click on the quick mask button on the bottom of the layers palette.



2. Notice the new image in the layer palette next to the image you are going to mask. Also note that the foreground is now white and the background is now black.

3. Select the gradient tool and choose "foreground to background" from the gradient choice.



4. Click where you want the dark part of the fade to start and then drag your mouse to where you want the fade in to be complete. If you want a straight fade, hold down the shift key when you drag.



5. When you are done, click on the small image in the layer palette to continue working with the picture instead of the mask.



If you need to redo the fade away, in the layer palette, click on the small picture of the image mask and then click on the garbage can at the bottom. It will ask if you want to apply the layer mask before deleting. Click on no and the picture will be as you originally started.



hope it doesn't take too long to load...

 

Thats awesome Stacy,

I've been using PS for years now and I didn't know that - Thanks . . .

 

yes, thanks!!
I've managed this sort of thing a few times, but never so easily.

 

AWESOME Stacey, lately I've been wondering how to accomplish this in photoshop and have been meaning to get some tutorials but being a one man sign shop can be pretty demanding of my time, no time to just sit down and play with the software. Thanks again, this is great.

 

Stacy (or anyone) could you teach me an easier way to fade out the edges of a portrait?

I often have to add a baby's photo to a banner, & I always crop it to an oval & then fade the edges by using the 'feather' ommand under the selection menu, but I'll admit it's pretty hit & miss as to getting a real nice edge. Sometimes I select the outside of the oval & hit delete 3 or 4 times before I get a nice edge... but depending on the feather value... I start to lose a little bit of the photo farther in then I wanted to. There must be an easier way.

Along the same lines... although I've become fairly proficient in Illustrator for may things I do on a regular basis... I never use the blend tool there either & I encountered something interesting recently that I want to learn how to do.
It was several contours (tha Hawaiian islands actually) that all faded out at the edges... much like the baby photo fade mentioned above... except that they were vector contours & the effect was done in Illustrator, but I don't know how. I've attached what it looked like below. (It wasn't a radial gradient... which would only fade in exact circles...)

 

Turn this into a HOWTO

 

Gradient Mesh tool..

here is a tutorial that does something like that,, but it uses a heart

 

I'm used to seeing the mesh points if that's how it was done, but I guess they could have "expanded" it?

 

I would blend it

Doug to accomplish the effect, I would blend it.

In this case, I took your example and

• Hand drew one vector with a white fill.
• I then offset the path to create the inner vector and applied the green fill to it.
• Next, I selected both vectors, set my blend steps for 64 and executed a blend command.

Done!

My effect is not as complex as yours appears to be. If i wanted that level of complexity, I would have done the same thing but two or three times using different shades of green.

 

Great tutorial Stacy!

I have copied and saved it to its own thread.

 

Thanks - glad it could be of help!! Had some time on my hands yesterday...

 

Excelent job Stacy! Fred why don't you also put it in the tutorial section?

 

Thanks guys I'm an extreme novice with this sort of thing and that was a great tutorial.

 

The tutorial section would be the logical place but, unfortunately, it requires a totally different formatting scheme. Right now I'm too pressed with other work to get into doing that. What I really need to do is to reformat the tutorials as posts and create a tutorial forum.

For now, I just felt it was a good enough reply to stand on its own ... so I duplicated it to make linking to it easier.

 

Thanks Fred! It's amazing how many cool tools & features are in our software & to discover them after years of ignoring them always makes me think I should have taken some classes, or become more explorational with my software.

I did try out the blending tool & got very similar results. My curiosity is still focused on the difference in how my original file looks. Just for fun, I'd like to draw attantion to that again to see if i can learn anything more.

My original (client supplied) file is shown a the post above with one contour selected. I double checked that file & there IS only one contour. I also checked the "expand" feature on Fred's method, & it results in 64 contours.

I also explored the consequences of node editing the outer white countour on the blends I did with Fred's advice & the results were just as I expected... spreading my 64 steps between the fixed green shape & the new location of the edited node.

Then, in CS2, when I tried to edit the single contour on the original client supplied file... I got a much different, & unexpected result shown below. I am curious now if anyone has more information about what I'm dealing with in that file? (It was just a print job, so this is purely explorational... not important)

I did check to see if there was any kind of mask to release... but there is not.

 

Is there a stroke as well as a fill on that vector? How about emailing me the original file so I can see how it was constructed.