Photoshop CS3:
In this tutorial I will show you how to use the feather tool. Feathering is today’s software term for the traditional technique known as vignetting: a soft edged border around an image which blends into the background. This technique is very effective when compositing one image onto or on top of another. It is simple, but effective technique and we are going to be using the Feather Tool in conjunction with the lasso tool in order to achieve the desired effect.

So here we have an orange, forgive my dirty counter.
Say you want to move this orange into another image.

First, you make your selection around the orange with the lasso tool

Using the magnetic lasso tool will be faster for a simple object like an orange. To select the magnetic lasso tool left click and hold down on the lasso tool icon then select the magnetic lasso tool.

Then make your selection around the orange.

The magnetic lasso tool is not perfect, and the selection it made not be good enough for you. If that is the case return to the regular lasso and add or subtract to the selection by either holding down shift to add to the selection or holding alt to subtract.

Once you have a selection you like, go to

Select > Modify > Feather

A menu will pop up asking you how many pixels you want to feather by. For this image, I chose 3 pixels, and a good amount to feather is usually about 1-5 pixels depending on how large the image is. Experiment with it, see how it comes up with different amounts.

Once you have used the feather command, make sure the layer of the image you are feathering is slected and press Ctrl+J to copy it to a new layer. You now have your image with a feathered border, ready to be put onto another image.

With Feather

Here would be the orange with feather. I exaggerated the amount of pixels you should use to make it look good usually, to illistrate the effect, this feather was a 5 pixel amount.

Without the Feather

And here is the orange without feather, as you can see, the shadow and darker colors are visible around the orange, as well as some jagged lines.

So there it is, a simple explanation of how to use the lasso tool with compositing and the feather command. I hope you learned something, and remember to experiment in photoshop. and visit www.webflostudios.com