EasyFade › How to fade a photo into transparency

How to fade a photo into transparency

Fading a photo means letting part of it dissolve into nothing, so whatever sits behind it shows through. Not fading to white, and not fading to a colour you picked to match a background. Actually transparent.

Most tools that claim to fade a photo give you a gradient to white or to black. That looks right until you put the image on a coloured background, a patterned one, or a slide with a photo behind it, and then the rectangle of near-white gives the whole thing away.

What you want is a real alpha channel: the part of the picture that faded is genuinely absent, so it takes on whatever is underneath. That is what this does, and it does it in your browser, which means the photo never leaves your computer.

Step by step

1. Open the editor. Go to the EasyFade editor. Nothing to install and no account needed.
2. Add your photo. Click the canvas, or drag a photo onto it, or paste one straight from your clipboard. Nothing is uploaded anywhere; the picture is read directly by your browser.
3. Choose which edge fades. Pick an edge, or several. Each one you turn on starts dissolving inward from that side.
4. Set how far it reaches. Drag the distance control. A short fade softens just the border; a long one can take half the picture.
5. Set how gradually it falls off. Softness controls the curve. A low value gives a crisp hand-off, a high value gives a long gentle wash. This is the control that decides whether the result looks deliberate or cheap.
6. Save it as a PNG. Download the result at full resolution, or copy it straight to your clipboard. PNG keeps the transparency; JPG cannot, and will fill the faded part with white.

Why the result has to be a PNG

JPG has no way to record transparency. Every pixel in a JPG has a colour and nothing else, so when a program saves a transparent image as a JPG it has to decide what colour "nothing" is, and it almost always decides white. If your fade looks perfect in the editor and arrives with a white wedge in it, that is what happened.

PNG carries an alpha value per pixel, which is how it can say "this pixel is 40% there". WebP also supports it. If you are putting the image into a document, a slide or a web page, use PNG.

Fading more than one edge

Turning on two adjacent edges fades the corner between them as well, which is usually what you want for a vignette. Turning on all four gives you a soft oval of image floating in nothing. The distance and softness controls apply to every edge you have enabled at once.

Common questions