Seamlessly Blend Two Images in Adobe Photoshop - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Blend two images together in Photoshop Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, seamlessly blend two images in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're going to look at seamlessly blending two images together, so you're going to learn about layers and masks. You're also going to learn what you can do if you don't have enough background to use behind your blended images. As you're watching these videos, you'll see a prompt which let you recommend this class to others. Please, if you are enjoying the class, do two things for me; give it a thumbs up and write just a few words about why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations are really important to me. They help me get my classes in front of most students who just like you, want to learn more about Photoshop. Now if you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. So if you're ready now let's get started blending two images seamlessly together in Photoshop. 2. Seamlessly Blend Two Images Together - Part 1: The images that I'm going to use in this class are these two here, and you can download them from unsplash.com. I'm going to give you the link to this photographer's collection at unsplash.com because if you're not happy with using these images, you could use, for example, these two. They are the same model, the same outfit and pretty much the same location. Now, I've also gone ahead and located two other photographers at unsplash.com who've shot the same subject in similar locations. These are by no means the only photographers that have done this. But if you're looking for other images you can use, I'm going to give you the link to this photographer's collection that's Brooke Cagle and also Larisa Birta. I've used these images before in a similar process and so they're also handy to use. Of course, you can just go to unsplash.com and look and see if you can find some images that you would like to work with. They will be best if they were shot in similar lighting conditions, similar locations. I've got these two images. Let's open them up in Photoshop and get to work. I have the two images open here in Photoshop, and what I need to do is to put them both in the one document. I'm going through the second image. I'm going to right-click the background layer, choose Duplicate Layer. I'm going to choose the other image from the document drop-down list and click "Okay." I can now close this images, I don't need it any longer. I'm taken to the second image and you can see it has two layers in it, one for each of these images. Now I'm going to need a little bit of extra Canvas here because these two images are pretty much on top of each other. I'm going to unlock the Background layer. In later versions of Photoshop, you can do it by just clicking on the lock icon. Let me just undo that. In earlier versions of Photoshop, you'll need to pick up the lock icon and drag it onto the trash, or you can just double-click the Background layer and click "Okay." Either of those processes are going to unlock that background layer. Now when we add some more Canvas, it's going to be transparent. If we didn't unlock that background layer, when we add some more canvas, it has to be filled pixels because you can't have transparency on a background layer in Photoshop. I'm going to use the crop tool to add some extra background with clicking on the Crop tool. In earlier versions of Photoshop, you might have to select the entire image with the crop tool. Then let go, and then you can just drag outwards on the crop handles to add some Canvas around the image. I'm guessing that about this much will be plenty, and I'll just click the check box. I've now added some transparent Canvas to this image. I'm going to the Move tool that target the topmost layer and just move it across. Now, I have a slight problem with this image right now and that is that this side of the image is bigger than this one. This is the more compelling image, the one where the woman is looking towards us and we really want to be looking at that, so we want our eye drawn to that. But this one is larger and because it's larger, it's dragging our attention away. So I need to size this down. I'm going to the Move tool and I'm going to hold the Shift key as I drag down on this just to make sure that it's sized in proportion. Once I get it into position, I'm just going to click the check mark. Now, that leaves me with a problem. I've got a gap here, an area that has no content in it. I'm also looking at this overlap area and you want to make sure that when you're working with these images that you have plenty of data in this overlap area. Now we're a little bit short here, and there's a chance that when you're working with your own images, you might be very short. Let's take a small diversion now and look at how we're going to get some extra image behind these images so that when we use the mask, we're not going to be masking away to transparent background. We're going to have a background here that will fill in the are that we're masking through. If you're working with Photoshop CS5 or later, we're going to look at what you're going to do. If you're working with earlier versions, I'm going to deal with that secondly. In Photoshop CS5 and later, we're going to do what's called create a stamp layer. I'm going to click the topmost layer of this image and I'm going to hold down Ctrl Alt and Shift on the Mac, that would be Command Option Shift. I'm going to tap the letter E. What that does is it creates a stamp layer. I've still got my two layers here, and I really need those because I'm going to blend those in a minute. But what I've got on the top here is a layer that is the composite of everything that was previously visible. So I've got a whole image here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to fill in the background. I'm actually going to create an entire layer here that only has this tree detail in it. So I'm going to the lasso tool. I'm just going on this top-most layer, going to select around the woman and fairly close to her because I want to remove her from the background, but I want as much of these tree detail as I can. Just going to press the "Delete" key. I'm going to do the same over here. I want to get rid of everything that is her. I'm just going to finish up here with a bit that I didn't remove, and press Ctrl or Command D to deselect any selection. Now I'm going to the magic wand tool. I'm going to make sure that contiguous is not selected. I'm just going to click in one of these empty areas and what that's going to do is select all of the empty pixels. Now we'll go to Edit and then Fill and from the content drop down list here, you're going to select Content Aware and click "Okay." Photoshop's going to fill these areas with content that it can see on the screen right now. I'm just going to press Ctrl or Command D to deselect the selection. By removing the women's faces, all that was left on that layer was tree detail. Photoshop is forced to fill in those empty areas with that tree detail. Now, there's a couple of little problem areas here, but that's really easily solved with a tool like the Spot Healing Brush Tool. Just going to get that tool, going to size the brush down to a small size using the open and close square bracket keys to adjust the brush size and just drag over the areas where I've got some unwanted corner detail, if you like. That is not a perfect background, but it is all we're going to need to put behind these two images so that later on when we go and create our masks, if we're masking away this image here, we've got something behind it to catch it and we can blend it in. That's how you do it in Photoshop CS5 and later because you've got that content aware fill tool. If you're working in earlier versions of Photoshop, we're going to address that need now. If you are working with CS5 or later, you can go ahead now to the next video. I'm just going to get rid of the layer that we created and we're going to look at what we've got here in terms of image detail. Here we're going to have to fudge it because we don't have a tool that's going to do all the work for us, but we've got plenty of tree detail that we can use. What I'm going to do is make a selection on this top area of this image of the tree detail that I have. I'm going to copy it. So I'm going to choose Layer, New layer via copy, and that puts that on a separate layer. I've got this piece here. Now we're working with what is pine tree detail. There is nothing to say how big or small a pine tree leaf needs to be. I'm just going to hold the Shift key as I drag this out to make it fill the entire image. I'm going to duplicate this last. I'm going to drag it onto the New Layer icon and with the duplicate, I'm just going to flip it. You can see here that what I'm doing is building up a background where there was none before. I could do this again. So I could grab this, drag it onto the new icon and flip this piece. Because we're in each case flipping them, we're ending up with what's looking like a seamless background. There's nothing here that is not blending reasonably well into the next layer. Having got these three layers together, I'm going to right-click and choose Merge Layers. Then if I need to, I can go with the spot healing brush. If I'm seeing some unwanted seams, I can just paint over them. But since we came here to create a seamless background that we could put behind these two layers so that if when we're blending these two images together, we poke through an image and show up what would normally be transparent pixels, we've got something behind this image that we're actually going to blend too. Now, in some circumstances, when you do do your blend, you might like what you're seeing behind the image. Well, that's fine. You can come and get the clone stamp tool or some other tool to just make the background up and make it look a little bit better. But you'll know at that point which bits you need to work on. Right now we have no clue which part of this background, if any, we're going to need to use. So we've got something behind the rest of the image. We've got something to work with and if we need to perfect it later on, we can do so when we know what it is that we need to perfect. Now we've prepped the image, we're ready to go ahead and we're going in the next video to blend these two images together. 3. Seamlessly Blend Two Images Together - Part 2: To blend these two layers together, the two layers that have the woman's face on it, we're going to select the topmost image because that's the one that we need to remove some contents from to be able to see the one underneath. Whichever image is on top, that's generally the one that you want to start blending in. With this top-most layer selected, I'm going to click the Add Layer Mask icon to add a layer mask that we can use to paint away some of this image. The reason we're using a layer mask is if we don't like the result, we can easily undo it. It's not going to be baked into the image the same way it would be if we were using the eraser. Now there's no reason why you couldn't choose the other image to be on the top. You can choose either of them. To me seems a little bit easier to be blending this one into the one below because I know what parts of the one below I want to see. It's going to be pretty quick and easy to do. I'm targeting the mask, it's got a little marker around it that tells you that the mask is actually targeted. When you're working on a mask, you can paint in black or white or any shade of gray, you can't paint in color. So you're only going to be able to paint with black or white or gray. You're going to need a brush. I'm going to click on the Brush tool, I'm going to open up the brushes panel, going to select a round brush. At the moment it has a 100 percent hardness, so I'm going to wind that back to zero hardness to start off with. The size is a little difficult to adjust from this panel because you really don't know whether 250 is going to be too much or too small or whatever. I don't generally adjust size, I just click away from that dialogue. Then adjust the size of the brushes in the open and closed square bracket case. That works on Macs and on a PC. It just makes it a little bit easier for you to visually see what the brush size is going to be. Now we're painting with black because this mask right now is white. Painting with white is not going to change it at all. Obviously, if we want to see through this layer, we're going to have to paint with the opposite color, which is black. Black's on the foreground here. I've got my mask targeted and you can see as I'm painting on the image, the color is actually going on the mask here. What's happening as I paint, because I'm painting with solid black, well, it's nearly solid black my opacity's now at 100 percent, I'm poking directly through this layer to see the layer underneath. As I work, I'm just going to adjust the brush size because I want to blend these two images together so that the result is somewhat seamless. I don't want to be able to see easily where I've stopped painting. For example, this is a seam, I don't want to see that. I'm going to flip my colors. When you're working with masks and using black and white, it's really handy to know the keyboard shortcut to flip these colors and it's X. It just means that you don't have to continually click this button, you can just be working on the keyboard, just click the X key to change between the two colors. Now you can see I'm building this back so that we're no longer seeing that seam between the two images. I'm going to enlarge my brush a little bit, change my color again, pressing the X key and just blend this in. Again, I've got a problem here, just switch the colors back, adjust the brush size, and just work at creating an invisible change from one image to the other. Over here, when I poke through the image, I'm going to see the image behind, and that's just fine. I actually don't think I'm going to need much of the image that we actually created as a background here, but I'm just going to make sure that it is looking fairly seamless. Now, this seam down here is coming from this image here. You can see that this layer here doesn't have any content up here. The seam that we're seeing is all belonging to this layer underneath. If we want to blend out that seam, we're going to this layer and we're going to add a mask to it. I'm going to target the mask, we're going to paint in black. We're just going to paint out this seam here. Quite often you'll find that just working with a very small brush is all you need, you don't need a lot of effort to paint this out. You're just looking at trying to create that seamless transition. Now I can see obviously, a very distinct repetition across here, and it's obviously darker at the top of this image. But I'm also looking at the image and thinking there's a lot of space above her head that we just don't need. I'm actually going to crop this image before I work at the top because I may not need to do any work to it at all. I'm going to click on the Crop tool. Just going to bring the top-down because there really was way too much image content above her head there. Now that we've done that, you can say that the blend is actually pretty good. We probably don't need to do anything in there at all. I'm really happy with the seamless blend that I have right now. The only thing that's concerning me is this lighter corner of the image here. I think the image would look better with a vignette. We've got some dark corner here, dark corner here. I think we could darken this up and darken this up. To do that, I'm going to add a new layer. I'm going to get the Rectangular Marquee tool. I'm going to drag inside the image. I'm going to create a rectangle that is pretty evenly spaced in from the edges of the image. It's not rocket science, it doesn't have to be measured, just eyeball it. At the moment I've got the central area selected. I'm going to invert that by choosing select and inverse. Now I've got a rectangle around the edges of the image selected. I'm going to the Eyedropper tool because I want to sample a color from the image. I'm thinking probably around this color here. It's not quite black, but it is quite dark. Once I've got that sampled as my foreground color and I've got my selection made, I'm going to press Alt and Backspace. That would be option Delete on the Mac to fill the outside border area that I have selected with that color. Then I'm going to deselect the selection. I like to press Control or Command D, but you can also get it here by choosing select and deselect. It's really important that you deselect this before you go to the next step. I'm going to multiply, blend mode this, so I'm darkening the edges. Now because this is a solid band of color, I want to soften it. I'm going to apply a blur to it. With that top layer selected, I'm going to choose Filter, Blur, and I'm choosing Gaussian Blur. Gaussian Blur is pretty much your go to blur. It's an awesome blur for blurring everything. It doesn't take into account hard edges and we don't want to take into account hard edges here. We want to blur this a lot. We really just want a little bit of color around the edges of the image. I'm going to do that and click Okay. Now I've probably got a bit more color than I wanted, so I'm going to actually transform this vignette. I'm going to choose Edit and then Transform and Warp. What that does is it adds this warp grid over the image. I want to color the corners, but I don't want to necessarily color the side areas. I'm just going to drag these joins outwards. What that does is it's pulling this vignette away from the image into the area around the image that's outside the document that we're seeing. But because I'm leaving the corners in place, the darker color is still being applied to the corners. It's just being removed here from the edges. You can see even in here that we're pulling the edges of the vignette away from the image. It's only really affecting the corners. I'll click the check mark. This is the final result. We've been able to, in just a few minutes, seamlessly blend these two images together. We've done all the work with a mask. Essentially 99 percent of the work has been done on this top layer by just adding a mask, painting with black, and just softening the edges to bring these images together so that you cannot see where one image ends and the other one begins. Your project for this class will be to take two images and to seamlessly blend them together. You can use the two images that I've used or you can use other images of your choice. Post an image of your finished project in the class project area. As you've been watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. Give it a thumbs up and write in two or three words even why you're enjoying the class. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.