Easy Blending
Blending is one of the most basic things you need to learn in photoshop, so here's a quick tutorial on two different blending methods.I'm going to be blening together these two images of Piper Perabo: image 1 and image 2. Now I'm going to make a new canvas (file > new), my width is 700px and my height is 600px but you can chose whatever size you want. Now I just use my move tool (V) to drag the two images on the canvas. These images are huge so before I start blending I'm going to have to shrink them down. Take one of the images and go to edit>free transform (ctrl+t). A bar will pop up and you just have to lower the percentage beside H: (height)/W: (width). Make sure the you lower the height and width by the same amount- you can easily do this by pressing the link button in between the two- as seen here. After shrinking both images down and placing them to my preferences, my canvas now looks like this:
Blending through masking
Now for the blending, as the title says, I'm going to be masking to blend. So select the picture that's on top in the layer panel. Then go to layer>layer mask>reveal all. After this you'll see a blank white box pop up beside top layer. This is what'll look like. Now have your layer mask selected, set your foreground colour in black (#000000), take a very soft round brush with a radius of about 200px and start brushing on the places you want to erase/blend. You'll start seeing black appear in the mask and you'll soon start to see the bottom image appear. If you made any mistakes and erased anything you didn't want to by accident- just switch colours to white (#FFFFFF) and brush where you want the picture to re-appear. This is what I have so far:
This still looks pretty messy, so I'm just going to take a smaller & harder brush and erase the parts around here so there isn't any pink showing over the black. My final product looks like this:
For some different blending you can also use cloudy or grungy brushes for a different effect.
Blending using the lasso tool
Now for the second method- I'm going to be using the lasso tool (L). First do as you did before- drag the pics onto the canvas, resize them and place them. Then select the lasso tool and change your settings to new selection (first of those four tiny boxes), 15-30px for feather and check the anti-alias box. The higher the number for feader, the more faded it'll turn out. Here I'll be using 20px. Now use your lasso tool on the top image to select what you'd like to get rid of, like so:
Then press ctrl+x (edit>cut) on the top layer and this will cut what you selected out, but leave it all faded so the two pictures blend together. This is what I got
As you can see, it looks all weird around Piper's elbow, so I'm just going to take the lasso tool again, lower the feathering to 5px and I'm going to carefull select the pink surrounding Piper's elbow, like so...
Then I cut that out again (edit>cut) and I get this:
So I like using the masking method better as it's good if you make any mistakes, but the lasso tool is quite easy to use.
