Using feathering to get a clean and soft edge

1. Start with selecting the part of the image that you want with one of the lasso tools found in the Fireworks toolbar.
2. After selecting the part of the photograph that you want to cut, click on
Modify > Marquee > Feather. A dialog box appears that you can enter the number of pixels you are interested in. I usually enter a number above 3 to 10 pixels.

Note: The number of pixels you enter will determine the softness of the picture.
3. Then choose Modify > Marquee > Select Inverse and hit the delete button and the background or the part which was not selected will disappear.

Note: You can repeat the deleting part many times and in that way your images gets softer.

In this example I used the Polygon Lasso Tool to select the part I wanted to feather. For the second image I did not use feather, as you can see the edge of the image is not clean and for the third image I used 10 pixels feathering and after choosing select inverse I hit the delete button twice. As shown below the edge of the image is much softer and cleaner.