Quick Layer Mask[Blending Images]

[Marko]

In this tutorial I will show you how to quickly blend images into each other with minimum fuss.

First of you need to find a picture or pictures that you want to blend together, for my pourposes I have chosen an image of Hemlock Valley taken by Tami.

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With this photo I\'m going to do a very simple blend which should hopefully give you insights and ideas for how you would like to do your blend.

The first Thing I did was copy the background layer of the image. I Did this by right clicking on the background picture and clicking Duplicate Layer.

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The next thing I did was to flip the copied image horizontaly, which I did by going Edit>Transform>Flip Horizontal.

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Now would be a good idea to restore your colours to default, you can do this by pressing D.
Now that your colours are in place (black foreground, white background in pallet) You can move to the next step of applying a Layer mask.

To do this click on the little square with a circle in the middle as show on picture, this should then create a white square in your layers pallet. This is going to be your \"canvas\" for blending.

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After you have done this go to the gradient tool which should be in your tools pallet, if it is not shown, right click on the paint bucket and choose the Gradient tool.
Make sure you have the same settings as in the provided image.

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Then do a sweep with the gradient tool on the main canvas where ever you want the image to blend, it takes a bit of practise to get right.

And your done, hopefully you should have a good image blended, if not keep playing aournd with the gradient tool till you do. <img src=\'http://www.killanet.net/forum3/public/s ... >/blum.gif\' class=\'bbc_emoticon\' alt=\':P\' />

Tip: When doing this you can also use a brush to blend in the images for that fine detail, however when doing this make sure that the \'mask\' canvas is still selected and that you can do this with only black and white. The black colour wipes away the top images( in this case the background copy) and the white colour brings the wiped out details back.

What I got:

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