See the screenshot.This may help you PC specs :
OS Windows 10.0 Pro
MB - AS rock Z77 extreme 11
Intel 3770K @ 4.0 Ghz OC
Gskill 32 GB RAM 1800 Mhz
6 TB HDD, SSD bootable
nVidia ASUS GTX 660 Ti
BenQ 22" LCD monitor 1920x1080

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Cheers
Adrian Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated. (see below)
Confucius
AMD Phenom IIX6 1055T, win10, 5 internal drives, 7 usb drives, struggling power supply.

Thanks for these shots but not quite what I was seeking to solve.
I want to select a part of a picture as per example but remove the sharp edge so that it is gradual from faded to the highlight. I am not looking to create a border ... rather the reverse. I have tried placing the same picture directly below but can't seem to solve it. CYa Ron (W10/i5gen8/Nvidia)
Someone famous once said: "We only have the 4th dimension of 'time' so that everything does not all happen at once"

I'm not sure that you will be able to easily achieve what you need from within PD itself.

My rough examples were made from a quick custom mask produced in my image editor. You can get the mask effect by adding a customised mask into the PD "system" (which is a little complicated) or by using a .png image as an overlay.

It has to be a .png to handle the transparency that you require.

There are a couple of tutorials on masks here:
http://youtu.be/6YcfK2l56P0
http://youtu.be/9LWc_x1fVQ8

Cheers
Adrian



Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated. (see below)
Confucius
AMD Phenom IIX6 1055T, win10, 5 internal drives, 7 usb drives, struggling power supply.

Hi Ron -

Have you tried using the Spotlight effect in the Effects Room? Doesn't that do what you want?

As Adrian has suggested, masks in PD can have a feathered edge. These work fine when the mask transparency is set to 100%. When you want to use the mask to highlight sections of the image, & transparency has to be set to (say) 50%, you're going to generate a black outline around the area you're highlighting. You don't want that, I don't think.

If you just overlay a "mask" image in a higher numbered track, you'll probably get the effect you want.



To do that, I used the semi-transparent overlay attached and adjusted opacity in PiP Designer. It probably won't suit your purposes because of the position of the circle.

Cheers - Tony


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Thanks for all your clues to solving this ... seems there are a number of possibilities.
Spotlight seems a good way to solve a highlight with feathered edge. Will experiment more, maybe import effect from another editing programme.

Great that you folks give your time to problem solving. CYa Ron (W10/i5gen8/Nvidia)
Someone famous once said: "We only have the 4th dimension of 'time' so that everything does not all happen at once"

Ron -

Unless the spotlight effect works for you, you're absolutely right.

To make the mask overlay used above, image editing software was used that supports layers & transparency. I used Paint.NET (free), but there are many others.

Using only PD, adding (say) borders, blurring & transparency in PiP Designer has limitations. PD doesn't pretend to be a graphics editor & can't achieve many of the finer effects. We all use a variety of software to get what we want!

Cheers - Tony
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