Blending

[amysum1]

Originally Posted by amyleigh1204

Gwen--we actually covered one method to do this in the PSE course. Place your photo over your background, then with that layer selected, switch to your lasso tool. Set your feathering to 100 or above, then draw your shape that you want on the photo (it will indicate that edges that you want to get rid of). Then go to Select>select inverse, then hit delete. The part of the photo that you want to discard will disappear leaving your feathered photo.

You can play around with the feathering amount until you get it just the way you want. It is really very easy, once you understand what you doing.

Amy said it much better than I did! LOL! Before her class I would extract the object or person and then lower the opacity so it looked blended. That is a lot of work to achieve the look...LOL! So glad I took Amy Leigh's class and read ABitDaffy's tut!

[goldscraps]

I know of two ways to do this in CS2 that both accomplish the same thing. You can use a mask for simple blending or you can use the pattern stamp tool for more complex blending.

With the mask:

1. Start with your paper and add the photo on the layer above.
2. Click on the photo layer to select it and then press the mask button.
3. You should see a white mask added onto the photo layer.
4. Set your foreground color to black.
5. Load the brush I have attached to this reply. I could have told you what the brush settings were, but it is easier to just attach the brush for you.
6. Then, select the brush tool and also click on the mask in the layers palette.
7. Start carefully painting the edge of the photo. This is a very large brush and you can scale it down if you need to depending on how much blending you want.
8. Carefully erase all of the edges using this brush and the mask.
9. After you get the edges blended away, you can click on your photo and change the blending mode if you want (or not). I like multiply and also overlay depending on the effect you want. Try out several of the blending modes to see what you like best.

With the pattern stamp tool:

1. Start with just your paper
2. Select the entire canvas
3. Go Edit->Define Pattern
4. Add your photo onto the layer above your paper next.
5. Add another blank layer above your photo for 3 layers total.
6. Select the pattern stamp tool.
7. In the options bar check "align", find the pattern you just saved of your paper in the drop down box and also load the brush I have attached to this message.
8. On the blank (top) layer above your photo, paint over the edges of your photo. The pattern stamp tool paints patterns, so it will paint your paper over your photo.
9. Once you have painted out the edges of our photo, you can click on your photo layer and change the blending mode to suit the paper you are using.
10. The thing I like about the pattern stamp method is that you can apply a texture to the pattern you painted on the top layer to make the blending even more interesting. A grain or canvas texture works great! You can also change the hue/saturation of the top layer too. There are so many possibilities!

Let me know if you get stuck with any of these instructions. :)

[Maisie]

Cool!!!
I am going to try this after my pies are in the oven!!! Tonight!

[inge]

I'll try this to ! Those instructions are great ! THANKS !

[Jody2]

Just read all the posts here. Thanks for everyone helping out as I too have been experimenting with blending and not getting the best results in the world. Now I have some tuts to go by and will see if I an do better.

I appreciate any scrapbooking tuts using PSCS2 or PSCS3 so much :)

[landofoz]

and PSCS4

thankyou