EasyFade › How to fade the edges of an image

How to fade the edges of an image

A soft edge, sometimes called a feathered edge or a vignette, lets a photo sit on a page without a hard rectangular border announcing where it stops.

Edge fading is the most common thing people want and the easiest to get slightly wrong. The two things that decide whether it looks professional are how far the fade reaches and how gradually it falls off, and those are separate controls for a reason.

Step by step

1. Add your photo to the editor. Click the canvas, drag a file in, or paste from the clipboard.
2. Turn on the edges you want to fade. One, two, or all four. Two adjacent edges will also fade the corner between them.
3. Set the distance. How far in from the border the fade reaches. Start around a tenth of the image width for a subtle border, and go much further for a dramatic dissolve.
4. Set the softness. How abrupt the transition is. Low values give a defined edge to the fade itself; high values spread it into a long, even wash.
5. Save as a transparent PNG. Download at full size or copy to the clipboard.

Distance and softness are not the same control

This trips people up. Distance is how much of the image the fade covers. Softness is the shape of the curve across that distance.

A long distance with low softness gives you a wide band that still has a noticeable start — useful when you want the fade itself to be visible as a design element. A short distance with high softness gives a tight, gentle feather that reads as "this photo just has a soft edge". Most of the time, the second one is what people are reaching for.

Fading all four edges

All four edges at once is a vignette to transparency rather than to black. It works especially well on a photo with a plain background, and much less well on a busy one, because the viewer loses the frame of reference that tells them what they are looking at.

Common questions