Blurring edges of .JPG image ?

Question

How do I take .JPG photo image mask it, and blur the edges?
It is a rectangular photographic image that I want to create
a central oval in focus, and "ovalize" the
rest of the rectangle outside central focused picture, and
blur the outer band of the rectangle.
I'm a newbie if you couldn't tell.
Fred Z.

Answer 1

There are a bunch of ways you could do this in Fireworks, but
I think the easiest and most flexible would be to use a vector
ellipse, with a feathered edge, as a mask on the bitmap.
1) Open the JPG in Fireworks
2) Use the Ellipse tool to draw an ellipse inside your image.
Keep ellipse small enough so that the edge of the ellipse is far
enough away from the edge of the image for the feathering.
3) In the properties panel, make sure the ellipse is white
4) In the properties panel, look for the "Edge" dropdown and
change it to "Feather"
5) You can set the Feather amount.
6) Select both objects (the original bitmap image, and the
vector ellipse) and choose Modify > Mask > Group as Mask
At this point you should have a nice feathered, elliptical
mask to your original image. You can change the background color to
match your website background color (select nothing, then look in
the Properties panel to choose background color).
If you find that the ellipse is not quite the right size,
position, or feather, you can continue to edit it. Look in the
Layers panel, and click on the mask thumbnail (it will be the
thumbnail on the right of the two thumbnails which appear "linked"
together). Once selected, you can change the feather. If you want
to move or scale the ellipse without moving/scaling the image, you
must "unlink" the mask -- simply click that little chain link icon
between the mask thumbnail and the image thumbnail in the layers
panel. Once unlinked, you can click on the mask thumbnail and
move/scale without moving/scaling the image.
Hope that does the trick!