I am trying to mimic the below image on a portrait to be used at a funeral. Can anyone help with how to create this cloud-like effect where the image fades out into white? I have searched everywhere and not having much success, even the ole' chatgpt wasn't useful.
Where I am stuck....I used the adobe preset to convert my image to watercolor and cleaned it up from there. The issue with the adobe preset is that it just sticks a background on it, and creates somewhat hard lines that do not cleanly fade into white. It is being printed on a white canvas, hence the reason I need it to fade into white before it gets to the edges of the canvas. Thanks!
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The trick is to add a layer mask, and paint out the background with a suitable brush. If you have the Legacy brushes loaded start typing Rough Round Bristle into the Brush tool's right click search bar.
Make sure you have a layer behind the subject layer, and fill it with White.
Select the subject layer and add a Layer Mask
With black as the foreground colour, paint out the outside. The mask should have a double white border to make sure it is selected.
To soften the effect, add feather to the mask in Mask Properties
If you'd prefer a more regular outline, drag an elliptical path over the image (select the elliptical shape tool, and make sure it is set to Path in the Options Bar.
You can then Right click the path in the Paths panel, and choose Stroke Path Note the brush preset and size must be set before doing this.
The default for stroke path is the Pencil, so you will have to select Brush from the drop-down menu.
You will still need to manually mask out the area outside the elliptical stroke.
Note: It's a good thing I tested this, as it was not working well when I first tried it.
In Brush Settings > Shape Dynamics set control to Off
It was still a bit tentative, so keep tapping the Stroke Path icon at the bottom of the Paths panel till you get a good mask.
A wee tip
If you Alt click the layer mask, it opens the mask full screen, which makes it easier to paint out the outside of the stroked ellipse. Alt click the lay mask again to return to the image.
If you unlink the layer mask The little chain icon (my yellow highlight) you can Transform (Ctrl T) the mask independently of the image to reveal more or less of the background.
BTW I worked out why I needed multiple strokes to cut through to white. It was because I still had that 30% feather applied.
Another option would be using images (selfmade, stock, AI-created, …) and use one or a combination to form the basis of a Clipping Mask.
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