Portrait and help needed

[Slovensky]

I am quite pleased with how this looks at the moment (there's one or two things that I still need to think about) BUT I need help with the edges of the shot.

When I print it out it the grey edges look really harsh on the paper (and for the life of me I can't get it to fit, borderless, onto A4). What I want to do is have the grey gradually fading out to white to the edge of the page so that aren't any edges and the grey just fades away - does that make sense?

I have tried everything I can think of (I use CS2) - blurring the edges, using the gradient tool, painting towards the middle with white and ever decreasing opacity and none of them are achieving what I'm after.....

I need to finish this before 8am tomorrow (it's just gone half past two in the afternoon for me) because it's gotta be printed off and put in the post by then.

So whaddya think of the shot and does anyone have any bright ideas to solve my problem? Pleeeeaaaassseee :hail: :crazy:

Slovensky
x

 

[mentos_007]

1stly you may try cloning - try to clone some grey parts the whites and so on... from the very top of the pic to the very bottom.
or try a crop. you may crop a bit of top and/or bottom to adjust it to A4.

 

[Slovensky]

1stly you may try cloning - try to clone some grey parts the whites and so on... from the very top of the pic to the very bottom.
or try a crop. you may crop a bit of top and/or bottom to adjust it to A4.

I've tried adjusting it to A4 but for some reason I end up losing some of the image.

 

[Marctwo]

Select the rect marquee tool, set feather to suit (try 10-20px and see how it looks), select the whole image and then copy and paste. Hide the bg layer and you should have nice, soft edges.

 

[Slovensky]

Select the rect marquee tool, set feather to suit (try 10-20px and see how it looks), select the whole image and then copy and paste. Hide the bg layer and you should have nice, soft edges.

Hi Marctwo

It looks a bit like this....and much better on a paper than here.

My wedding photographer (and now virtual photoshop and tog' advisory service) told me how to do it in the end and it's almost identical to what you advised.
I selected an area with the rec. marquee tool, set feather to 50, I inverted the selection, made sure the colour palette was on default and then just hit delete. BINGO lovely soft edges!

Oh but first I had to make the canvas size bigger and extend the background to give more space to work with, otherwise I ended up with bits of the dogs missing.

Thanks for your reply :mrgreen:

 

[Marctwo]

Looks good. :thumbup:

There're lots of things in PS like feather that people don't understand. But when you find a new one, it's great fun to play around with for a few days. :mrgreen:

 

[Slovensky]

Looks good. :thumbup:

There're lots of things in PS like feather that people don't understand. But when you find a new one, it's great fun to play around with for a few days. :mrgreen:

It never occured to me to use feathering to achieve this effect that I wanted, and then when someone tells you, you can't believe you didn't think of it before :banghead: :lmao:

Just goes to show that everyday's a school day :mrgreen: