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"Photo Edge Effects"


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You can easily achieve the same effect in APub (and the other Affinity apps) by dragging a shape to the masking/cropping position for the image layer and applying a Gaussian Blur layer effect to soften the edges.

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Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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You can feather the edges using the transparency tool, depending on the shape..

I'm not really seeing a way to blur just the edges using Publisher, but if you also have Photo, you can prepare such a shape using Photo, copy/paste it into Publisher, then save it into the Assets panel as an asset that can be reused.

 

As an example:

  1. Create the desired shape using a shape tool or any other means of creating a vector shape within Photo.
  2. Duplicate the layer; leave it precisely over top of the original layer.
  3. Give one of the layers a fill but no stroke.
  4. Give the other layer a stroke but no fill; make the stroke thick (70pts or so) and make sure it is center aligned (the leftmost "Align" option in the Stroke popup from the context toolbar, which is the default)
  5. Set the stroke of the stroked object to an elliptical gradient; reduce the opacity of the point that shows up on the right in the popup to around 50% or perhaps just over.
  6. With the filled object selected, add a Gaussian Blur live filter using the popup menu on the Layers panel (this is the one step you can't do in Publisher or Designer - only Photo can create these, though they do get copied to the other programs along with the final object).  Set the radius to around 9 or so.
  7. In the layers palette, drag the stroked shape layer to the right edge of the thumbnail of the blur filter to turn it into a mask for the filter (it should have a crop icon over it in the palette after you place it there)
  8. This should leave you with the filled-shape layer containing the blur filter containing as a mask the stroked shape layer.
  9. Select the filled-shape layer and Edit/Copy
  10. Switch to Publisher and Edit/Paste
  11. Drag the shape in Publisher into an appropriate place in the Assets panel (create a new category for these first)

 

To use this:

  1. Drag the shape out of the Assets panel (after the first one you already pasted into the document from Photo)
  2. Expand the filled shape in the layers panel, but leave the blur filter layer collapsed so that the mask inside of it is not showing
  3. Drag the image layer containing the photo underneath the blur filter layer, but as a sibling not a child (it should be aligned with the blur filter but a child of the solid shape)

 

You might need to experiment after that with the thickness of the stroke, the blur radius, and so on, but you can make those adjustments within Publisher once the filter has been created.  You can also do these after the first one from within Publisher, without having to switch to Photo, by copying the blur layer from another shape you already created.

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16 hours ago, iscom said:

That seems to blur the whole image not the edges

Really?? :o

APub_Mask_Gaussian-Blur.png.611d5d51c9623cd62fe4ad2a2d5502b5.png

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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ok, took me another look to catch on... @Alfred and @Michail are blurring the mask rather than the image, and you can certainly do that in Publisher, as indicated.  This will give a fuzzy shape to the edges but the picture itself will remain sharp and crisp.

If you want to blur the actual image, you will need to use the live filter instead, and only Photo can add those.

Looking more closely, the OP's examples do seem to be blurred masks, so this technique is probably more relevant than what I described.

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Ok Will try again  or maybe you can supply a section of shapes that I can add images :D

I only want the images to be feathered at the edges   
BTW I don't have Photo so can I do this within Apu as fed10i has described 

Many Thanks

 

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If you are only trying to blur the mask it is actually simpler than I outlined above.

Just create the shape to use as the mask and drag its layer to the right of the thumbnail of the image layer in the layers palette to make it a mask of the image (you should see a vertical line highlight up against the image showing that it will become a mask).

Then select the mask layer in the palette and click the "fx" button under the list of layers; enable Gaussian Blur and adjust the radius.

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20 minutes ago, fde101 said:

Just create the shape to use as the mask and drag its layer to the right of the thumbnail of the image layer in the layers palette to make it a mask of the image (you should see a vertical line highlight up against the image showing that it will become a mask).

I find this a bit fiddly to position the mask correctly in the layers panel. I prefer to select the photo, then create the shape with whatever tools you want, then right click the object in the Layers panel and Mask to Below. I'm using this feathering process a lot these days and it really is useful. You do need to make sure the mask shape is displayed as a child of the photo layer to ensure only the photo gets feathered.

Windows 10 Pro, I5 3.3G PC 16G RAM

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31 minutes ago, fde101 said:

If you are only trying to blur the mask it is actually simpler than I outlined above.

Just create the shape to use as the mask and drag its layer to the right of the thumbnail of the image layer in the layers palette to make it a mask of the image (you should see a vertical line highlight up against the image showing that it will become a mask).

Drop the shape layer on top on the image layer’s thumbnail, not to the right of it.

Quote

Then select the mask layer in the palette and click the "fx" button under the list of layers; enable Gaussian Blur and adjust the radius.

That’s exactly what I did, and what I meant by “dragging a shape to the masking/cropping position for the image layer and applying a Gaussian Blur layer effect [to the shape layer] to soften the edges”.

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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2 minutes ago, Alfred said:

Drop the shape layer on top on the image layer’s thumbnail, not to the right of it.

Good catch - the mouse pointer can actually be over the thumbnail, but the highlight shows up to the right of the thumbnail.

 

3 minutes ago, Alfred said:

That’s exactly what I did, and what I meant by “dragging a shape to the masking/cropping position for the image layer and applying a Gaussian Blur layer effect [to the shape layer] to soften the edges”.

I gather that now, but in the original post you left out the "to the shape layer" part and the assumption seemed to be that it was applied to the image layer, which gave the undesired effect.  I was clarifying it for the OP.

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2 minutes ago, fde101 said:

I gather that now, but in the original post you left out the "to the shape layer" part and the assumption seemed to be that it was applied to the image layer, which gave the undesired effect.  I was clarifying it for the OP.

That’s a fair point. When I wrote those words it was obvious to me that the layer effect should be applied to the dragged/dropped shape, but I can see from the subsequent discussion that it wasn’t as clear and unambiguous as I thought!

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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As a starting point for anyone still struggling with this, here is a small set of starter "photo edges".  I am by no means an expert on making these so I'm sure you can tweak them to make them better, and I only did a few as a set of starter examples.

 

To prepare these for use:

  1. Open the attached document: Photo Edges.afpub
  2. Create a new asset category in the Assets panel: 1589707595_ScreenShot2019-02-22at20_00_16.png.2c33f5d7b57a2df2fb77540fe18a640b.png
  3. Select all of the objects in the document (Command+A on the Mac, guessing Control+A on Windows?)
  4. Drag them into the new category in the Assets panel: 539084223_ScreenShot2019-02-22at20_18_36.png.b0e2a777c98d909ed1fd91a094be40a0.png

 

 

To use these in a document, just drag one from the assets panel into your document, place a picture in the frame, and resize and manipulate to taste.

 

EDIT: fixed the asset that somehow got duplicated in place of one of the intended ones

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7 hours ago, fde101 said:

 

  1. Drag them into the new category in the Assets panel: 539084223_ScreenShot2019-02-22at20_18_36.png.b0e2a777c98d909ed1fd91a094be40a0.png

 

 

on windows you can't drag in to the assets panel, but have to add from selection.

add.png.55ec2cf2c9ad41fac18f6842929a2a7d.png

intel core i5,  16GB 128Gb ssd win10 Pro Huion new 1060plus.

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1 hour ago, iscom said:

How did you create the shapes?

Mostly just using the shape tools that are available in Publisher.  For some of them I used the "Add" or "Intersect" buttons (I have them on my toolbar) to combine multiple shapes.

 

The general process I used:

  1. Create the (vector) shape using any of the available tools (shape tools, pen tool, boolean operators, etc.)
  2. Apply a gaussian blur to the shape using the layer effects options (select the shape, click "fx" in the Layers panel, make sure the Gaussian Blur tab is selected along the left, turn up the radius to taste)
  3. Drag out a picture frame (using the rectangular picture frame tool) that is slightly larger than the shape (leave some space above, to the left, to the right, and below the shape)
  4. In the Layers palette, drag the shape to the right side of the thumbnail for the picture frame to make it a mask for the frame
  5. Deselect all, then select the picture frame
  6. Use the Color tab to assign a color to the frame to make it visible in the Assets palette (otherwise it is transparent)
  7. Add the shape to the Assets palette (on the Mac you can drag it in, on both platforms you can choose Add from Selection in the hamburger menu of the subcategory)

 

Relevant tutorials:

 

 

 

 

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