How to Do Feathering in Photoshop

In creating soft selections, Adobe Photoshop emulates this downy feather's edges.

When you build a mask or selection in Adobe Photoshop with a gradual transition from opaque to transparent at its edges, or add a soft vignette to an image element in a collage of photos, your graphic treatment features a feathered edge. Photoshop's feathering techniques gain their name from the similarity between their results and the soft tips of real feathers. Feathering ranges from slight to extreme, producing effects from barely perceptible softening to dramatic blurring.

Instructions

Selection Tools

1. Activate any of Photoshop's Marquee tools. The program includes four types -- Rectangular, Elliptical, Single Row or Single Column -- nested together in one section of the Photoshop toolbox. To create selections by drawing around the perimeter of an object rather than by clicking and dragging to form a one-step geometric shape, choose one of Photoshop's three Lasso tools -- the regular Lasso or its Polygonal and Magnetic siblings.

2. Double-click on your chosen tool's toolbox icon to bring up the Photoshop Options Bar if it isn't already visible. If you chose the Elliptical Marquee or one of the Lasso tools, click on the "Anti-alias" check box to eliminate jagged edges.

3. Enter a value in the Feather data field to set the width of the edge transition. The effect of your transition depends on the size and resolution of your Photoshop file and the size of your selection. In a 300-pixel-per-inch document, a 30-pixel feather occupies only one-tenth of an inch, whereas the same value applied in a 72-ppi document occupies nearly one-half inch. Large feather radii applied to small Marquee selections can make the entire selection area partially transparent. When you use a Lasso tool to make your selection, the feather radius applies outside the area you select.

Gaussian Blur

1. Make a selection using any of Adobe Photoshop's selection tools. Activate anti-aliasing if the tool offers it, which is true of any selection option that can create areas with non-square edges.

2. Press the "Q" key to enter Quick Mask mode, in which your selection appears as if it were an area you painted. Press the tilde key, located to the left of the numeral "1" on standard keyboards, to view your selection by itself as a grayscale image, without your active document layers underneath it.

3. Open the Filter menu, select its "Blur" submenu and choose "Gaussian Blur." Click on the "Preview" check box to activate a preview in your document window as well as in the filter interface itself.

4. Enter a value in the "Radius" field or drag the Radius slider to set the width of the transition. The effect of your blur depends on the size and resolution of your Photoshop file and the size of your selection. For example, in a 300-pixel-per-inch document, a 30-pixel blur covers less area than it does in a 72-ppi document.

5. Click on the "OK" button to apply your blur. Press the "Q" key to exit Quick Mask mode and return to your document interface.

Painting

1. Activate the Brush tool in the Adobe Photoshop toolbox. Double-click on the tool icon to open the Options Bar if it isn't already visible. Open the Brush Preset picker from the drop-down Brush menu. Choose a reasonably large brush diameter and set brush hardness to zero percent. Brush size relates to document resolution, so a 30-pixel brush creates a bigger stroke in a low-resolution file than in a 300-pixel-per-inch file.

2. Press the "Q" key to enter Quick Mask mode. Paint in black around the area you're trying to select, creating a closed outline with a soft edge.

3. Press the tilde key, located to the left of the numeral "1" on a standard keyboard. This key command displays your selection as if it were a grayscale document.

4. Switch to the Paint Bucket tool, nested with the Gradient tool in the Photoshop toolbox. Click inside the perimeter of the area you defined with the Brush tool to fill it with black.

5. Switch back to the Brush tool. Open the Brush Preset picker and set brush hardness to 100 percent. Paint out the thin area of white between the soft inner edge of your painted perimeter and the hard-edged fill created by the Paint Bucket. Press the "Q" key to exit Quick Mask mode and return to your regular document view.

Tips & Warnings

• To create a soft-edge "doughnut-hole" selection, in which most of your document area falls inside your selection except for a portion in the middle, select your entire document area, then switch to Quick Mask mode and paint with white.

• The Brush tool can offer you the quickest way to create a soft-edge selection of an irregularly shaped object. Hold down the "Shift" key and click from one spot to the next around your object to paint from click to click without having to drag the Brush tool.

• Enter Quick Mask mode and use the Eraser tool in Brush mode to refine feathered selections, using a brush set at zero percent hardness.

• Make sure the distance between your selection edge and the outer edge of your file is greater than the diameter of your selection-tool feather setting, the radius of your blur or the diameter of your Brush preset to avoid creating a selection that bumps into the edge of your document. If you use such a selection to mask an object, then expand the size of your document canvas, you'll discover a hard edge where your selection terminated at the edge of your file.

References

• Adobe Systems: Using Adobe Photoshop CS5

Resources

• The Photoshop CS3/CS4 WOW! Book; Linnea Dayton and Cristen Gillespie
• The Photoshop CS/CS2 WOW! Book; Linnea Dayton and Cristen Gillespie
• Photoshop Masking and Compositing; Katrin Eismann