10e20 Blog

Sometimes it is fine to use a soft edged eraser to fade one image into another, but what if you are no longer happy with what you’ve done and want to scrap it all together?

Yeah, sure you can go back a few steps in the history palette, but better than that just apply a layer mask to an image and go back and reveal whatever you want by painting white in the mask. That is just one of the advantages to using a layer mask when blending images.

In this tutorial you can learn a quick way to use layer masks effectively to blend various images together in a collage like technique. I use layer masks a lot now, and am always discovering cool things that they can do. When using layer masks just use this mantra, “white reveals and black conceals”.

Find a few images that you want to put together into one. These are the images I am using:

Step 1: Open the image to be used as the background. This will be the main document, you will then add layers (images) on top of this main background.

Step 2: Position the other images in the general area you want them, keep them as separate layers.

Step 3: Add the layer mask to the image. This icon is in the layers palette and is a circle within a square. This is a white layer mask, meaning that it will show everything until black is added to it. That’s why adding this layer mask doesn’t affect the image at all the white reveals the entire layer, so it looks just like it did before you applied the layer mask.

Step 4. Paint black into the layer. With the layer mask selected paint black into the layers by using any tool you prefer. For my image I began with using a gradient from black to white and applied that to the image. This adds a gradient to the image that blends from transparent to solid- white being solid. If you look at the layers palette layer mask, it now appears with the gradient. Apply this layer masking with either the gradient or brush tool to all other layers in the image.

Final. Fine tune the mask with the brush tool. You can get more detailed masking by using the brush tool and painting black on the areas that you want to further conceal. If you want to show more of the image then paint on it with white using the brush tool. Just remember that black conceals and white reveals. For the image of the surfer all that I needed to use was a gradient tool with the layer mask to remove the sky from the photo. The wave was pretty much straight across so no fine tuning was really needed.

Tips: To get a feel for the masking abilities of the layer mask, apply a mask to an image and just use a simple brush and paint or scribble anything using both white and black. Play around with various brushes, sizes, opacity’s as well as hard edged brushes or soft.

Use the different layer blending modes to get alternate ways in which the various layers interact.

Insert some vector graphics or illustrations from Illustrator and mask them in with the photographs, this can give your image a dynamic look.

After you are finished, merge all the layers and then go back and do one more final adjustment to the curves and selective coloring, this will give your image a much more cohesive look and feel.