The way I would do it:
1 - Pick the eliptical marquee tool (if the upper left of the tool palette shows a dotted square, click and hold over it until more tools fly out and then select the dotted oval)
2 - Use it to draw an oval selection. The oval should be in the center of the fade range. In other words, the dotted line it shows will be in the middle of the fade-out
3 - decide how many pixels you want the fadeout to be. If you are at 300 dpi and want the fade to take 1/2" from solid image to solid background, then the fade is about 150 pixels.
4 - divide that number by 5 (in this example, the result is 30)
5 - go to Select > Feather and enter that number
6 - go to Select > Invert
7 - Click on the add-layer icon in the layer palette, and drag the new layer to the top of the stack of layers
8 - set the foreground color to be the color you want the background to be (for example white or black)
9 - Select the Paint bucket tool and click outside the slection oval.
What this all does is to create a mask that starts at the edge of the image and goes toward the center. The outer part is your background color and the center is transparent. Since it is the top layer it will cover all other layers and only let them show through in the center of the oval. In the feathered area it fades between the color you filled with and transparent. So basically it fades between whatever is under that layer and whatever fill color you used outsode the oval.
The advantage of doing it this way is you are not modifying the underlying layers. You can continue to modify them, scale them, position them, etc... and the mask will always cut the oval in the same place. If you had cut out the other layers in the oval shape you couldn't later move the image a little to the left or right without going all the way back to before you cut the edges of the image. With this method the cutout shape and the image you put under it are independant and either can changed without changing the other.
BTW, the divide by 5 part is based on a test I just did in CS2. I don't still have CS loaded, but supect it's the same. The number of pixels you enter in the Select > Feather dialog needs to be smaller than the size you really want the feather to be. In CS2 I calculate it to feather about 2.5 times as many pixels on either side of the original selection to fade completely to 0% or 100%. Hence the divide by 5.
Once you are finished you will then probably need to flatten the image and send it to PhotoGrave, or use Photoshop's Image > Mode > Bitmap to convert the image into dots to laser onto stone. |