Photoshop: Basic Blending

When photos are properly blended into each other, the product looks as if it took hours to make. In reality, it only takes a few minutes depending on the amount of photos and effects you’d like to add. This tutorial will show you the very basic of blending two photos together using Adobe Photoshop (version 7.0).

The first step is the easiest step of all- open up photoshop and select the two photos you’d like to blend together. Because this is simply the basics, it is best to have the images be the same size. It’s also best if the photos aren’t “busy” photos. Once you’ve mastered the basics, it’s much easier to go around and play with different sizes, contrasts, blending gradients, ect.

Once you have your two photos, decide which one you’d like as the background. Click the photo, look under the Layers box, and double click background. A box like the following should pop up. Once it does, click okay.

Then choose the move tool (circled in photo). Use this tool to drag the lesser photo onto the prominent one. Align the dragged photo completely over the old photo. As stated before, once the basics are covered, you can experiment with different alignment.

Under the layers box, you should now see “layer 0” and “layer 1.” Highlight layer 1 by clicking on it. Then select the “add vector mask” took as shown in the image below. Then click on the white square that will appear.

The next step is to click on the gradient tool. It is a square that fades from white to black on the inside. If you do not see this, right click on the paint bucket and choose gradient. At the top, you can choose from a variety of different gradients.

Once again, this tutorial will stick to the basic which is fading from left to right. Now click anywhere on the image to give the gradient a quick test. The arrow on the following picture shows where I clicked and dragged to.

You can now click and drag around until you find the gradient that is right for you. If you feel the placement of the image on top is off, click the move too again and move it around. It will not change the gradient you have just set. It is possible to choose more than one gradient with more steps, but this is a basic tutorial, so on one gradient is shown here.

If everything is how you like, you can choose to flatten your image. This means condensing everything you just did into one image (in short, no more layers). To do this, go to menu bar at the stop and choose layer and choose flatten image. Now you can continue to edit it or save it!

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. Feel free to ask any question and to experiment with more type of gradients and images.