Archives for October 11, 2016

Tutorial Tuesday (Photoshop Elements)

Simple Photo Blending

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Last week Carla asked if I would do a quick tutorial on blending photos into backgrounds. There’s always more than one way to do things, some quite easy, others more involved. Today we’re going to look at an easy way to blend photos, with a twist. (Caylynn had a layout in the gallery last week that caught my eye. I sorta kinda copied her example.)

So let’s get started. First, decide what photo you want to blend. I chose a photo I found on Pixabay that had some interesting aspects to it.

Next you want to choose the paper you’re going to blend it into. You can use almost anything for this, but to make it more visually interesting, pick a paper that’s got some grunge, a pattern or an obvious texture. I didn’t know what would appeal to me most so I went to my GS stash and did a tag search for “paper”. A couple of hours later, after I’d gone through them all (well, it took a few minutes) I had several that I wanted to get a feel for. So I stacked up all the papers I’d chosen and turned them off except for the bottom-most. Then I put my photo on top of the stack of papers.

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The first step in the actual blending is to lower the opacity of the photo so the paper under it shows through. So I pulled the photo down to 40%.

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Then I worked my way up the stack of papers, turning them on bottom to top. The screenshots show some of them so you can see the effect each of them had on the photo.

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In the end I went with a solid, soft purple paper from the GingerBread Ladies’ collection By the Dozen. But it was a bit too pink to blend well so I adjusted the colour a little. You can click on Enhance>Adjust Color>Hue/Saturation then pull the sliders, or you can CTRL/CMD+U to get there in one step. (You’ve all figured out that CTRL is for Windows and CMD is for Mac, haven’t you? The keyboard shortcuts are the same otherwise.) In the screenshot below I show you how I adjusted the magenta in the paper to a more blue shade. If you look closely at the edge of the photo you can see that the edge almost disappears when I’ve got the colour right.

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Once I was happy with the colour, I deleted all the other papers… except for one with a pale blue brocade pattern on it from Ooh La La ScrapsCarefree. I moved it on top of my pale purple paper and decreased the opacity to 40%. Now I had a nice subtle patterned paper to blend my photo into.

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I should back up for a moment here. You could enlarge your photo so that it covers the whole 12×12 paper if you want and just decrease the opacity until you’re happy with it… just like I did with the second paper. If that’s what you want to do, you don’t have to read any further. If you’re reading on – what are we going to do about that very obvious edge? You might notice that in the screenshot below, I have two copies of my photo, with the top one turned off. I’ll explain that later.

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The next step, getting rid of the harsh edge, required the use of the Eraser Tool and a soft brush. I have a gazillion brushes, many of which I picked up free from various sources. I chose one of the options from a collection called 20 Spray Brushes. I started off with the brush fairly small and the opacity on the brush quite low. It takes a little longer to get a good effect, but it’s easier to adjust if you go slowly at this stage.

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This part is easy but can take some time. Zoom in (CTRL/CMD++) so you can see where you’re working. Gradually erase the edge of the photo so there’s no obvious demarcation between your photo and your paper. You can click-click-click or click-drag or a combination to make it a bit quicker. [Resist the temptation to increase the opaacity of your eraser brush because it’s a lot harder to undo if you go too far.]  You can also increase the size of your brush as you go.

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Every so often, zoom back out (CTRL/CMD+ ) and take a look at the amount of blending you’ve done. Keep going until the photo looks like it’s part of the paper but there’s still detail visible.

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Here’s where Caylynn comes in. Her layout Wanderlust got me thinking. So I decided to take things a step further and show you how using a watercolour brush can add some punch to your blend. Literally.

I added a new blank layer in between my two photo layers. I went to my Brush Tool and selected a collection of Watercolour Mask brushes. (You could use any brush of combination of brushes for this step.) I tried them out for size and shape until I found one that would cover the girl and most of her sled.

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Brush settings can be adjusted to suit your purpose. You can change the angle, change the roundness and play with the other settings to really customize your brushes. You’re not committed to anything, because there’s always CTRL/CMD+Z!

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Once I had the brush the shape, size and angle I wanted, I made sure the foreground colour was set to white so I’d be able to see it against my layout but it wouldn’t interfere with the colours in the photo. Then I applied my brush to that blank layer. By doing this on a blank layer, you can adjust the size, tweak the angle and even skew the shape to suit your purpose. See how the photo below shows through the brush?

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Now that I was happy with the brush. I clipped the top photo to the brush (CTRL/CMD+G). See how it brightened the area of the blended photo?

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Then, because I wanted her face to be completely sharp and clear, with the brush/mask layer selected, I made my brush smaller, raised the opacity to 100% and painted over the girl’s face and scarf. (I used red for the screenshot so you could see what I did.) As long as you hold your left mouse button down while you use your brush, it will maintain the set opacity even if you overlap your strokes.

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See how much clearer and sharper her face is now?

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This is what my brush/mask layer looked like after I was finished. I decided to sharpen her whole body and a little of her sled. Once I was happy with how it all looked, I went on to finish my layout.

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So there you have some simple ways of blending photos, and a very basic mask-making lesson too! Next Tuesday I think I’ll tackle Danica’s request for some tips on extracting items from photos. It’ll build on this lesson a little, so stay tuned!

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