Photoshop Elements: Blend Photos Like A Hollywood Movie Poster
Adobe Photoshop Elements Tutorials at Photoshop Essentials.com
Looking for the Photoshop version of this tutorial? You'll find it here.
In this Adobe Photoshop Elements tutorial, we're going to learn how to take a couple of photos and blend them together like a Hollywood movie poster. Blending photos together is very easy to do in the full version of Photoshop thanks to layer masks, which unfortunately are not available to us in Photoshop Elements, but there's ways around that, as we'll see.
The biggest problem with blending images together is that finding two photos with similar colors isn't always so easy, and you can end up with an effect that doesn't really seem to look right because the colors don't match. With the technique that we're going to learn in this tutorial, you don't need to worry about the colors in the images at all because we'll be removing them completely and adding our own color to blend the two photos seamlessly.
Here's the first photo I'll be using:
Here's the image I want to blend it with:
And here's what the final effect will look like:
I'm using Photoshop Elements 5 for this tutorial. Let's get started.
Step 1: Drag One Image Into The Document Window Of The Other Image
The first thing we need in order to blend our two images together is for them to both be in the same document. To do that, with both of my images open on the screen in their own separate document windows (make sure that "Maximize Mode" isn't turned on by going up to the Window menu at the top of the screen, choosing Images, and then making sure there isn't a checkmark beside the word Maximize Mode. If there is, click on the option to remove the checkmark and turn it off), I'm going to grab my Move tool from the Tools palette, or I could press the letter V on my keyboard to quickly select it:
Then with my Move tool selected, I'm going to click anywhere inside the image of the couple walking on the beach to make that document window active, and I'm simply going to drag the image into the other document window:
When I release my mouse button, both images appear inside the same document, one on top of the other:
I can also see both images now on their own separate layers in the Layers palette:
