Written by Steve Patterson. In this Photoshop Effects tutorial, we're going to learn how to blend photos together like a Hollywood movie poster. Blending photos is easy to do in Photoshop thanks to layer masks, yet finding two photos with similar colors isn't always so easy, and you end up with a photo effect that doesn't really seem to look right because the colors don't match.

With this technique, 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 colors 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:

Let's get started!

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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, 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:

Step 2: Resize And/Or Reposition The Images As Needed

Now that I've dragged the beach photo into the other document, I need to resize it, and I can do that easily with Photoshop's Free Transform command. With the beach photo layer selected in the Layers palette, I'm going to use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+T (Win) / Command+T (Mac) to bring up the Free Transform box and handles around the image.

Problem is, this image is in "landscape" mode, meaning its width is longer than its height, and I've dragged it into a document containing an image that's in "portrait" mode (its height is longer than its width), so even though Photoshop has placed the Free Transform box and handles around my image, I can't see any of the corner handles because the sides of the image are extending out beyond the viewable area of the document.

To fix that, all I need to do is press Ctrl+0 (Win) / Command+0 (Mac) to fit everything onto the screen:

Now that I can see my corner handles, I can resize my image by dragging any of the corner handles inward in order to fit more of the image into the viewable document area. Since I don't want to distort the image, I'm going to hold down my Shift key as I'm dragging the handles to constrain the width and height proportions:

When I'm happy with the new size of my image, I'm going to press Enter (Win) / Return (Mac) to accept the transformation.

The beach image looks good, but the image of the couple behind it needs to be moved up higher. Again, there's a slight problem. The image is on the Background layer:

If I select the layer in the Layers palette and then click inside the document and try to drag the image up with my Move tool, Photoshop is going to complain and give me this pop-up message:

The warning message is telling me that Photoshop can't move the image because the layer is locked, and the reason it's locked is because it's the Background layer. Photoshop treats Background layers differently from normal layers, and one of the things you can't do with images on the Background layer is move them. To get around that problem, all we need to do is rename the Background layer, and the quickest way to do that is to simple hold down Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) and double-click directly on the word "Background". Photoshop will automatically rename the layer "Layer 0":

Just like that, the layer is no longer a special Background layer, and we're now free to move the image on the layer. With my Move tool still selected, I'm going to click inside the document and drag the photo of the couple up higher. Since I want to make sure I'm dragging straight up and not accidentally dragging the image a little off to either side, I'm going to once again hold down my Shift key as I'm dragging:

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