How to Feather an Image in Photoshop CS3

I have this picture of a flower and I would actually like to take just the bloom out of the photo and make the edge of it feathered. So to do this, I’m going to go ahead and use one of my selection tools to select the flower. I’m going to go ahead and use the elliptical marquee tool. I’m going to select the flower here and you might want to leave a little bit of space for your feather and if you do severe feather and then it’s going to actually blur the edges a little too much. So you might want to leave a little bit of room here and I have this selected and I actually going to feather this now.

So I’m going to go to select and then modify and then feather and the feather radius, usually if it’s a low resolution picture between five and 10 is going to give you a soft feather, nothing too dramatic. If you have a higher resolution picture or you want something a little bit more dramatic then I’m going to go ahead and increase it and see what kind of look it will give you. I got to go ahead and set this at 25 and click okay.

Now I actually want to select the inverse of the photo so the part I don’t have selected so I can delete that. So to do that I’m going to go up to select and then inverse and then press the delete key on my keyboard and then I’m going to go ahead and deselect this. And you could see that I have a very nice feather around them. I’ve taken it out of the background and I have this nice picture of just this bloom with a soft feathering around the edge. So that’s how you can feather an image in Photoshop.