LAYER BLEND

MODES

button, Photoshop plops the gradient into the layer mask, which effectively
fades your images together. If youre not happy with the gradient, just keep
clicking and dragging until you get it right; Photoshop updates the mask automatically. To empty the mask and start over, click the masks thumbnail in the
Layers panel, select the whole thing by pressing -A (Ctrl+A), and then press
Delete (Backspace on a PC).
4. Save the document as a PSD file.
This format preserves the documents layers so you can go back and edit the
gradient mask later.
Not bad, eh? Incidentally, this technique is a great example of how to use your own
imagery along with stock photos. Just think of the possibilities: a wedding photo
faded into a bouquet of flowers, piano keys faded into a sheet of music, Captain
Kirk faded into a shot of the Starship Enterprise, and so on.
TIP You can also rotate a layer to get the image in the right spot for your collage. Just activate the layer you

want to twirl and then summon Free Transform by pressing -T (Ctrl+T). Next, position your cursor just outside
a corner of the bounding box that appears, and when your cursor turns into a double-sided arrow, click and drag
in the direction you want to rotate the image. Press Return (Enter on a PC) when youre finished.

Layer Blend Modes

Perched near the upper-left corner of the Layers panel is an unlabeled menu of blend
modes, which control how pixels on different layers interact with one another. (Unless you change it, this menu is set to Normal.) For example, when layers overlap,
the top one can either block the bottom one completely, or the layers can blend
together in some way (these effects, and many more, are shown in Figure 7-7). You
control exactly how they blend together by using blend modes.
TIP To truly understand these modes, try duplicating an Image layer and then using your keyboard to cycle

through em all. Press Shift-plus to go forward through the blend mode menu or Shift-minus to go backward.

This section covers how to use layer blend modes, but you can find other blendmode menus all over the place in Photoshop:
In the Layer Style dialog box, where you can add effects like drop shadows,
glows, and so on (page 127).
In some filters dialog boxes and in most filters Blending Options dialog box,
which you get by using Smart Filters (see Chapter 15).
In the Fade dialog box, which you can access via EditFade right after you
run a filter (see the box on page 461) or apply any of the adjustments in the
ImageAdjustments menu.

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LAYER BLEND
MODES

FIGURE 7-7

Heres what Photoshops

blend modes do when you
use them to affect how
the colors on these two
layers blend together. (The
water image is on top in
the layer stack, though
the blending would look
the same if the happyface image were on top
instead.)
Its hard to fully appreciate
the power of blend modes
from looking at this figure,
but this gives you a rough
idea of how they differ. As
you might imagine, theyre
worth their weight in gold
when youre combining images, whether youre using
them to produce a darker
or lighter version (page
113) or creating a complex
collage (page 281).

In the Options bar when youre using a tool you can paint with, like the Brush,
Paint Bucket, Healing Brush, Pencil, Clone Stamp, History Brush, Gradient, Blur,
Sharpen, and Smudge tools.
In the Calculations (page 211) and Apply Image dialog boxes. (To learn how to
combine two images using the Apply Image command, which lets you pick the
channel Photoshop uses to do the blending, head to this books Missing CD
page at www.missingmanuals.com/cds.)

Chapter 7: Combining Images

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