Spent the last couple of hours designing a new header image for my website. I really don’t have any design experience, so this is really coming from no background whatsoever.

I started by browsing through some photos that might be useful in my portfolio. I use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.7 to do this. It’s an absolute awesome app for digital asset management (in other words, to manage all your photos!).

Once I found a few useful images, I fired up Adobe Photoshop CS4 (first time ever used PS CS4!) and started playing around.

One thing I wanted to learn was how to make photos merge better together, and I found these 2 online resources that were helpful. They demonstrate how to use masks, feathering and filters to create fuzzy edges on photos.

Blurred Edges | Photoshop Basics
Roge Photo Home – Ragged Edges, fuzzy, photo frames

I must have tinkered around with this for 5hrs.. learnt a lot about feathering, filters, layers & masks. Still got a long way to go, but it’s a start.

I had a PSD file for my header image and then I’d also open other images as well and modify them before I copy-pasted them into my header image PSD file. By modify I mean cropping, creating a mask for the border, applying filters to the border so the end result would be fuzzy edge borders on each individual photo.

Here’s a copy of my final page header image after half a day of tinkering.

I also included my photoshop file (PSD file) that you can open and see all my layers and how I went about in putting together this final image. I hope that helps.

pageheaderimage_2010_06_03.psd (Right ‘Save As’) (Size: 4.4MB)