This may be hard to describe and I'm not proficient enough to draw it yet so please bear with me.
I'm cutting parts of some photos of me and my girlfriend to put on a board game I'm making for her. Now simply cutting the photos creates a sharp edge which doesn't look beautiful, besides the fact that the cut is not very regular either.
My idea is cut a bigger part of the image, select what's left and shrink the selection. This way, I have a stripe around the actual image that I want to use. What I intend is to have a gradient in the transparency channel only where the gradient at the inner edge of the stripe is 100% and on the outer edge is 0%.
Is this at all possible? If so, how?
Another way I thought of doing this was to cut the part that I want and add a glow to it in the alpha channel only ( I didn't find a glow effect but I have a recollection of seeing it in the past). Then somehow try to replace that stripe's alpha channel with the glow I just created.
I didn't have any luck with either of these, but I believe this shouldn't be such a rare use-case. Does anyone have any suggestions how I can do this?
Here's an ASCII art of it!
____
GRADIENT / \
TRANSPARENT / __ \
STRIPE -----/> / \ \
/ / \ \
/ / \ \
| \ CLEAR \ |
COMPLETE / _/ IMAGE | |
TRANSPARENCY / / / |
| \__ \ |
\_ \_ _ / /
\_ \/ \/ /
\_ _ /
\_/ \_/