Design limbo

I got tired of the design for my health website so I decided to give it a proper overhaul. I started with a background image to go in the top right corner and knew that I wanted some kind of gym picture. I took a stroll through a bunch of "stock" photos but I couldn't find anything that I really liked. I ended up doing a google image search and going page after page until I found one (on about the 18th page). So I saved the image, opened up photoshop, and set about trying to make it fit.

I'm not that great at editing images, mainly because I don't really know how photoshop works and how to do different effects. I took a stab at it anyway and ended up searching on google for fading effects, as the picture cuts off on the left and bottom and I wanted it to blend in with my sites white background. I tried doing a mask layer and drawing a gradiant, but that only worked for one edge, and I couldn't find a way to have two mask layers on two duplicate layers of the treadmill picture. I eventually found an easy way to do what I wanted: make the background layer editable, fill it with white, then select an outline on the treadmill layer, feather it, inverse the selection (so you select the left and bottom bits), then just hit delete. It automatically fades out and looks ok.

That's all I've done with it so far. I'm not sure if I like the fading though as it still stops a bit abruptly. I might have a play and see if I can come up with something a little better. I still have a main logo to create (using the existing apple logo though) and then it's just twiddling with the style of the page to get things looking nice. I won't take a screenshot of it just yet though, as I have borders turned on for a few bits of the page so that I can see where they're going, and it doesn't exactly look nice. Plus I've started on a top navigational bar which isn't finished yet, plus I'll be moving a few bits around and re-thinking some other bits.