Soft Edged Colour Round a Picture

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By John Sweeney - 16th of January 2007

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How would you like a soft edged colour round the edge of a picture but you're not sure how to do it. Well, here we go:

Generally when you choose colours in photoshop you don't always get an immediate choice of the colour you want, that is because you are probably using version 7 or below, it is not a problem in CS or CS2. Therefore let's first prepare the colour you want to use.

On your menu bar there are two colours, Black and White, now, if you click on the top colour, usually black, a new colour pallet will appear on screen, click on which colour you want to use and click OK. The foreground square is immediately transformed into the colour you want to make use of.

Next, open your picture and release it from it's bounding box by clicking the middle icon on the top right hand corner. First make a new layer, just click on the create a new layer icon on the bottom of your layers pallet, what, layers pallet not open, then click F7, this is a new blank layer not a copy of your already opened picture.

Click on the rectangular marquee tool, top left on your menu bar, and draw a rectangular marquee from the top left to the bottom right of your picture about 3 or 4 centimetres in from the edge. The, go to select and choose feather, change this to 20, (Or use Alt Ctrl D on your keyboard), then Go to Select again and select Inverse, (Or use Shift Ctrl I on your keyboard), this ensures that you have selected the edge portion not the main picture.

Next, go to Edit and fill and choose the foreground colour, which you have already decided on, and click OK. Strictly speaking you have now completed the task you set out to achieve, so, all you need to do is hit Ctrl D to de-select, then flatten the image and save it.

However, there may be many facets of the completed work that you are not happy with, you can do something about this by hitting Ctrl Alt Z and going back a few steps and starting all over again, this will enable you to experiment until you are satisfied that you have reached the result you wanted to attain, once you have done so Hit Ctrl D to de-select and you are now ready to flatten and save the image.

Hope it works for you.

There are, of course, other ways to achieve the same result.