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We all know that if you use the rectangle selection with a feather of around 30 and a few deletes can accomplish the action of blending part of an image. But it seems that if you apply a Layer Mask, you can achieve an even better effect.
Now, what actually is a Layer Mask you say?
A layer mask lets you control how different areas of a layer are hidden and revealed.
How do you create a layer mask?
I'm going to use 2 images from photoshopmasking.com (a site that my class uses to collect images for lessons) to show you how to develop a simple layer mask. It isn't going to be a pretty image but it will show you what happens when you apply it.
I opened up the picture of the roses.
Then I opened up this picture of some clouds.
I opened both of the images up in photoshop and put them in order like the following on the layer pallette.
As you can see in the layer pallete, I have the roses layer on the bottom. I created a new layer and then added the picture of the clouds above that.
I selected the eye dropper tool and clicked in one of the pink areas of the rose image. You may have to click the eye next to the clouds layer and the empty layer that we created to get it to hide that layer so you can select the layer under that.
I then selected the empty layer between the rose and the clouds and went to filter->render->clouds.
Set this layer mode to multiply.
Next, select your top most layer which should be the clouds. Go to layer->add layer mask->reveal all.
Your layer pallette should now look like this
Select the white block next to the clouds layer to select the layer mask.
Select your gradient tool. Make sure you apply these settings:
Zoom out of yoru image.
I then applied a gradient from the bottom left to the upper right as shown:
The image should now look like this:
It's not a very pretty final image but it can be usefull in many ways. And there are a lot more things you can do with a layer mask other then using the gradient tool.
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