Fading?

[Crazy Man Dan]

By "fading," do you mean something like this?

http://www.musca.net/cmdsketchpad/resou ... banner.png

If so, here's how I made it:

Firstly, I opened up an image I'd created long ago using Terragen and cropped it to a respectable size.

I then opened up a second Paint.NET window. In this window, I deleted the "Background" layer after creating a new one. In the new layer, I created a rectangular selection and filled it with white. After clearing the selection, I blurred the layer with a 16px radius. Because the new layer had transparency, this created a fill that faded to transparent. After the effect had completed, I selected a small portion of the right side of the fade and copied it.

I then opened up a third Paint.NET window and clicked the "New" button. Paint.NET remembers the size of the last copied selection, and that is important for this effect. I created the new image with the values in the boxes and pasted the fade into the background layer. As transparency overwrites the previous information, a new layer is not needed here.

I then resized the image to the size of the image in the original instance of Paint.NET. Thanks to Paint.NET's excellent resampling, you'll get a perfectly smooth fade regardless of how large you have to make it. (I resized the fade from 49 x 27 pixels to 800 x 90 pixels, and it's smooth as a... smooth object.)

Next, I copied the new, larger fade and pasted it into a new layer of the original Paint.NET instance. As this new layer was on top of the layer with the image, the image appears to fade into white.

Then there are the line-y things and the text, but those aren't the subject matter for this post.

Now, depending upon the color you need to fade the image into, just change the color of the filled selection of the second Paint.NET window and continue as stated.

I hope that was of help! If you have any more questions, just ask,

Dan