Hello Fablers, and welcome back to another Academy tutorial. In this one, we're going to look at the Feather utility.
What is the feather, perhaps? It is basically when you blend the softness of the edge of your shapes to give them more nice sort of shaded fall off. Think of it as a gradient for your edges.
Really nice for blending when you have multiple layers stacked on each other. So at its more basic form we have here a shape layer in our canvas. With it selected, we'll go up to the effect window. And let's type in feather. Click, drag and drop.
Pretty quickly you will see here that the edge starts to gray out a little bit. If we go all the way to the left here on the amount, it'll give us a nice hard edge. If you go to the right, it's 100%.
Now with our fall off at 50%, that means that this edge here is going to feather off nicely and give us a nice, soft looking edge. If we turn it to the left, it increases the gradient, but gives us a hard edge. And if we go to the right, it uses the inside of our feather as the hard edge and cuts our shape down a little bit.
Most often you will keep this at 50%. Invert basically flips this inside out and gives us this cool sort of x-ray kind of effect where you're able to place layers in front or on top of each other and make them feel like you're inside of this kind of enclosed soft edge environment.
