How to do darkened borders?

[mocsa]

I'm sure you've seen this technique before where you put a faded dark border around the edge of your image to focus the attention of the viewer. This example is from psdtuts.com. I wanted to reproduce this in Xara.



I've come up with this in Xara:



Here the darkened border is simulated by 4 rectangles filled with black and with linear transparency from 76% to 100%. I have moved the rectangles a bit so you can see them:



The disadvantage of this is that if you want to darken the border a bit more, you have to adjust each rectangle separately. Also, if the shape is not a rectangle then the linear transparency will not follow the curve, like this:



Now my question is: is there a better way to do this? I thought about making a rectangle with a hole and apply feather but it will feather the outer edge of the rectangle, as well.



I would really be grateful for a nice and painless solution as this technique comes up quite frequently in my design projects.

Thanks a lot,

Csaba

[handrawn]

Hi

I thought about making a rectangle with a hole and apply feather but it will feather the outer edge of the rectangle, as well.

Csaba

If I understand this correctly can you not make the feathered rectangle slightly larger than the image so the edges overlap - then group - then crop back to image size - thereby removing the feathered outer edge?

[mocsa]

Yes, handrawn, I can do that but I just hope that somebody knows a cleaner solution. Furthermore, it would not solve the problem of non-rectangular shapes.
I just realised that what I'm looking for is a way to selectively blur 1-2 edges of an arbitrary shape. Yeah, I know it sounds impossible but it would be the ideal solution to many of my design problems.
Anyway, I'm curious what workarounds are you using in such cases.

[steve.ledger]

Perhaps Xero's Soft Vignette filter may help?:

http://www.xero-graphics.co.uk/set4/softvignette.htm

It's free by the way

[Egg Bramhill]

The tool that I prefer for this type of operation is the Contour tool. It remains edible and fits any shape.

Your method re feathering is equally as good you just needed the additional step of using a clip view to hide the outer feather.

Here's a xar file reproduction of your original using the contour tool to create a subtle darkened border for you to pull apart.

[mocsa]

sledger,
Thanks for the tip. There are also other good free photoshop plugins on that site. I'll check it out.

Egg,
Actually, I thought of using the Contour tool myself but I couldn't get the colors right so I gave up. I can't wait to get home and check out your xar file.