How to soften the edge of a photo?

[pamcal]

I am working with Corel Draw 12 Suite.. I have done this before but can't remember how to do it...I need to soften the edges of a photo . specifically the top edge so that it blends with a gradient I have created. How can I blur just the edge of the photo so that it isn't such a hard stop between the gradient and the pic??? Any help would be greatly appreciated!!
By the way.. the info on calendar templates was what brought me here and that made my day!!! Thanks!!

[sallybode]

Well I am glad you have gotten help here.

Have you tried to use the Vignettes under Bitmaps/Creative/Vignette? This works for some applications. But if you don't like the vignette, you can't just click it away, it is a permanent change. Save a backup copy, with out the vignette in case you have to go back. If you use this, you can use transparency and the multiply mode works well on this. You could also make a custom vignette which is vector, it is a little harder to explain.

If you made an oval matte for a picture, start with a rectangle and put an oval inside, and combine them together, then you have a whole in it, fill it with any color and make that color 100% transparent, add a glow drop shadow and change the shadow color to whatever works best with your picture, adjusting the opacity and feathering. There are also four other drop shadow adjustments: inside, middle, outside and average. Inside is a shadow you can never see unless you have added a shadow to a completely transparent object. This method allows you to even paint with a shadow, because you can change its color to whatever you prefer. You have 12, but in X13, there are additional shadow properties: blend modes which change how the shadow appears and they are all the same blend modes that you have with the transparency tool and are familiar with.

The majority of the painting below is executed in DRAW. What isn't are the fun brushes that come with PhotoPaint, seem like seaweed. The bird-like shape is blends overlayed with shadow painting as described above. The orb below it is just lines blended. The soft strokes around the bird is also shadow painting. The business card example was my first venture into shadow painting, at that time I was separating the shadow in DRAW and in 12 but it wasn't necessarry. My friend Sark turned me on to a better way of doing it. He wrote a script called gaussian blur, and then I wrote on called vignette that do about the same things but have different purposes. They take all the work out of shadow painting. The Artistic Media tool, once broken apart is very adaptable to use to create subtle, soft airbrush-like strokes. Whereas it cannot do all of what Xara can do, it does do a nice job as you can see. The third example ovelays the original drawing and using linear transparency set to Difference, gives a whole 'nother feel to the piece. As you can see the transparency tool just completely blends the bitmap into the vector drawing below it completely at the top.

There are five methods of transparency that you can play with as well: uniform, linear, radial, conical and square. With radial transparency, you can change where the white and black appear on the edit handles in effect reversing the kind of transparency, instead of the inside getting transparent, then the edge becomes transparent.

If you only needed to soften the edge of a picture on one side, you could use linear transparency, it works on bitmaps too, you just start the transparency near the edge. It is helpful to place a guideline and use snap to guidelines to make the transparency tool to snap to that as well. Be sure you turn snap up to high in Options, otherwise I don't get enough snap to make it useful.

Let me know what works best for you.

[-=Drifter=-]

wow sally, i really like those!!! (i like the blue one better than the green one) ((i can only assume that the character you drew is modelled after yourself - yikers!))

[sallybode]

No, the business card was done from, if you can believe it, a mirror. No, it wasn't me in the mirror, it was a big sticker of some hot biker chick and they wanted her sitting and holding a hair dryer and a comb so she'd look like a hair dresser across their name. The thing is that the two girls who own "Expressions" do rather look like this. I draw people, all types of people, and some of it may look like me, if I am doing a self-portrait. The curvature in the charicature was exaggerated, it is a cartoon. For years women strived to be taken seriously, alas. I probably look as much like my avatar as Kiwi, well, looked like his, except --- well more so, I am female. Really.

No, I am not a hot-biker chick. ---Mother of three boys, and the youngest is nineteen. But thanks for asking.

[pamcal]

Thanks for the reply Sally ! I will be trying that out this afternoon. Nice job!