Gimpdome

Here's a quick explanation of feathering and a simple example.  When you make a selection it has a "hard boundary"; only those things within the boundary are affected.  However, when you feather a selection, the boundary becomes "soft" (depending on how much you feathered) and things within the selection are still selected, but some of the pixels outside of the selection can be selected (again depending on how much you feathered).

Here's a simple example:



The circle on the left is the selected area (no feathering).  The one in the middle is selected area filled.  The one on the right is the same selection, but feathered 25 pixels and then filled. 

If you'd like to experiment with feathering further, you can check out my very first tutorial here:  http://www.gimpdome.com/index.php?topic=667.0

ok, thanks for the reply ^^b

guess it didnt make much of a diff... instead i used a soft brush to erase the borders and fiddled a lil with the opacities.. kinda got the same result