Faded Border

To start, just open up Photoshop. I'm pretty sure this works on all versions (maybe not the extremely ancient versions) but if there is a problem, try the help page in your program to see what you should be doing differently. Open up your image file, I have chosen the following:

Then select your Rectangular Marquee tool from your tooblar, and at the very top of te page (under File, Edit, Image etc.), you will see a space called Feather. Normally, next to that heading, you would have 0px, which you might want to set back to when you're done trying out this tutorial. Change the 0px to something bigger, I have chosen 30px. The bigger the number, the more fading will occur.

After you have chose a value for your marquee feathering, make sure the image is your active window and choose a spot to make a rectangular marquee highlight. The further away you are from the center, the less fading will occur.

Except it's not rectangular, is it? It's now got round edges, and that is an important feature to this effect. The round edges represent the spot from where your fading will occur. The closer the round edges are to the center of the image, the more fading there will be.

Once you're satisfied with your highlighted section, go to Select and then choose Inverse. Now the highlighted section is no longer highlighted, but the outer edges are. Now on your keyboard, press Deleted. Tada!

Unfortunately, you can't save this as .gif because then the fading will not occur and you will be left with sharp edges instead of faded edges. You can save it as .jpg but you need to have a background color beneath the image layer for the image to fade into. That is, if you want to display the image on a white background, you wll need to fade the image on a white background in Photoshop. Don't know what I mean? Test it out by saving it.

Other than that, it's a really nice effect to have handy, especially if you plan to make anime graphics.

~Jen