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Fading photos can add great motion and direction to your page. Since
there is no hard edge the eye tends to wander. If a fading photo is
placed beside important text, you have a natural flow. Fading photos
can also be used to minimize the visual impact of unimportant photo
details, allowing more viewing space for text.
Fading the edges of a photo is unpredictable at best. One may take
you five minutes with the next taking forever. Choosing your photo is
important. You need room to allow the color to blend from the page color
to transparent. It also helps when the colors on the fading edge of
the photo are similar to the background color.
If you are only fading on one edge, make sure you have an anchor on
the two sides that contact the faded edge. Here I have used lines to
contain the non-faded edges of the photo.
To create a faded edge in PhotoShop, you can use the gradient fill.
Make sure you are working on a new layer. Change your foreground color
to the color of the page you will be fading into. In the Gradient Menu,
choose Foreground to Transparent. Click and drag from the edge of the
photo that will fade to the page. I have found my best results with
several passes of this method, each on a new layer. Most times we want
a soft, circular boundary, and I have found that by laying down repeat
gradient fills, at different angles, I can reach what I am looking for.
You may have to touchup the image. I will often use the airbrush at
low pressure to round off linear gradients. In this photo, I had to
darken the hair where the gradient fill had spread too far.
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