So far in our quest to blend our two photos together, we've tried lowering the opacity of the top layer with disappointing results, since all that basically did was fade the entire image. What I really want is for the couple in both images to remain fully visible, with the blending of the two images happening in the area between the bride walking away from us on the left and her looking towards us on the right. I know, why don't I just use Photoshop's Eraser Tool! That's what I'll do. I'll use the Eraser Tool with nice, soft edges to erase the part of the image on the right that I don't need. Yep, this should work.

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I'll press E on my keyboard to quickly select the Eraser Tool. As I said, I want soft edges for my Eraser, so I'm going to hold down my Shift key and press the left bracket key a few times, which softens the edges. I can also increase or decrease the size of the Eraser as needed using the left bracket key on its own to make the Eraser smaller and the right bracket key to make it larger (the same keyboard shortcut works with any of Photoshop's brush tools). And now that I have my Eraser at the right size and with soft edges, I'll go ahead and erase away parts of the left side of the top image so that it blends in with the image below it:

After finishing up with my Eraser, here's my result:

Things definitely look much better now than they did when we tried lowering the opacity of the top layer. The couple is still visible in both images with a nice transition area in the middle, which is what I wanted. The Eraser Tool worked great! Who needs layer masks! I'm happy with this, I think my client is going to be happy with this as well, so I'll email a copy of the image off to my client, save my Photoshop document, close out of it, shut down my computer and go enjoy the rest of my day while I wait for the client to call me and tell me how awesome I am.

A couple of hours later, the phone rings and it's my client. They like the image overall, but they think I've removed too much of the bride's veil from the photo on the right and they'd like me to bring some of it back into the image, at which point they'll be happy to pay me for my work. "No problem!", I tell them. I head back to my computer, open my Photoshop document back up, and all I need to do now is bring back some of the bride's veil on the right by.... by....... hmm.

Uh oh. How do I do that when I've gone and erased that part of the image?

Simple answer? I can't. Not without doing the whole thing over again, anyway, which would be my only option in this case. There's nothing else I can do here because I've erased that part of the image and when you erase something in Photoshop, it's gone for good. If I look in the top layer's preview thumbnail in the Layers palette, I can see that I have in fact erased that part of the image:

And if I click on the eyeball icon to the left of the bottom layer to temporarily turn it off, leaving only the top layer visible in my document, it's very easy to see that the section I erased from the left of the top image is now completely gone:

The checkerboard pattern in the image above is how Photoshop represents transparency in an image, as in there's nothing there anymore. As in I've messed up and now I have to do the work all over again from the beginning. Stupid Eraser Tool.

So now what? I've tried lowering the opacity of the top layer and that didn't really work. I've tried erasing parts of the top image away with the Eraser Tool and while that did work, I ended up permanently deleting that part of the image and now if I need to bring some of it back, I can't. I guess all I can really do then is set the number of undo's in Photoshop's Preferences to 100 and never close out of my Photoshop documents until after the client has paid me.

Or... What about these layer masks I keep hearing so much about? Would they work out any better? Let's find out!

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