Fading an Image into the Background

This tutorial shows you how to make your own mask to fade an image into the background.

1. Open a new image or file and place the image on top of the image or background you want to fade into. This sample is a new page with a blue background. The image is from the Rubberball (www.rubberball.com) Health and Fitness CD.

2. Select the Rectangle tool and draw a rectangle to cover the image totally.

3. With the rectangle selected, click the arrow for the Fill Category drop-down list and choose Linear.

4. Click in the fill color box and in the Gradient editor click the preset arrow and choose White, Black.

5. In the Layers panel you'll see the rectangle is dark blue because it's selected. Press your Shift key and then click on Bitmap. This selects both the rectangle and the image.

6. Choose Modify|Mask|Group As Mask.
The image now has a mask.

To change the gradient to adjust the fade, click on the pen icon you see in the Layers panel (in the black image which is the mask).

Note: In the gradient, where you have white you will see the image. Where there is gray it begins to fade, black is totally faded (invisible).