How to Blend Images Like a Pro in Photoshop
If you want to make it as a professional designer or graphic artist, you are going to need to know how to properly blend images together. While this is something many people think they know how to do, if it’s not done properly, it won’t look as smooth as it could be. To master the art of blending images within Adobe Photoshop, be sure to watch the short, yet effective video tutorial below.
Secret to Blending Images Like a PRO – Face Transformation Effect | Photoshop Tutorial
In this quick tutorial I’ll show you how to blend the face into a plant using Photoshop. We start off with a picture of a man and a picture of a plant. I’ve already spent some time manually masking around the plant to remove its background. The first thing we’re going to do is take a chunk out of the man’s face to do this. We’re going to use the clone tool to extend the background. We create a new layer and then set the sampling to current and below. This allows us to use the clone stamped all without damaging the original image. In other words nondestructive we can also use part of his shirt as a sampling point to recreate the back of his shirt collar. Next it’s time to begin blending the plums in with the face mask and then use a soft black brush to hide some of the leaves. As you can see it’s important to take care when choosing our boundary line. One thing I notice is that this side of the face should be in shadow. To fix this we had a level adjustment layer above our plant. Then we clip it to the plant by holding down the OT or Option key while hovering over the boundary between the two. And when the icon changes clicking we lower the output level select the adjustment layers mask and then fill it with black.
By going to edit fill and selecting black from the dropdown menu then we can use a soft white brush to paint shadows around the side of the face and in the eye socket area as you can see it’s important to think about light directions and shadows when working on composite images. Our image is starting to look okay but the blending isn’t exactly looking convincing yet it would look better if the colors were blended independently from the shadows. To do this we duplicate the image of the man move him to the top of the layer stack and then change the blending mode to Hue. As you can see this blending mode does something very useful. It’s applied the color of the man’s skin onto the shape of the leaves to blondness in the mosque bottom while holding down the old or Option key to create an inverted mask. Then we paint over the leaf boundary with a soft white brush. This makes it look as though the skin is transforming into the leaves. Finally it’s time to spend some time tweaking the masks. After all this is a complex effect and there are plenty of details that we want to get right. As you can see we’ve created a really cool effect in just a few minutes and we can use this technique to blend all kinds of things together. That’s it for this tutorial. If you enjoyed it please subscribe and click the Like button and I’ll see you next time.
Special thanks to Graphics Geek for the video tutorial and walk through.
