http://www.cutcodedown.com/for_others/smfcandles/images/borders.png Im trying to make it so the shadow appears around my center body of the page like this: http://www.cutcodedown.com/for_others/smfcandles/template.html but I am restructuring the colors so that its not brown anymore, I was going to use #cae0db for the color, but cant figure out how to achieve this same effect (someone was coaching me about how to update my site and work with CSS/html, and included this graphic but I cannot figure out how to reproduce it, and cant get in touch w/ the person at the moment... thanks for the help!
The approach I used when I wrote that for you was to simply take the document background, make the center circular area in black, blur, blur, blur, then draw in the center the content area color, manually anti-alias the edges with the smudge tool, then floodfill with a ugly color (100% magenta) the center area to use as my palette transparency color. Paint Shop Pro's save-time optimizer lets you set the transparency color during save - #FF00FF is easy to remember as our 100% transparency. The effect is called 'close enough anti-aliasing' and is one of the many techniques I use to avoid using alpha transparency.