How to Blend Two Images in Photoshop – Everything You Need to Know – 5 Easy Ways

Learn how to blend two images in Photoshop 5 Easy Ways. In this tutorial, we will see how you can create a photo manipulation by combining two different images in a simple yet creative way. This guide contains everything you need to know to blend images in Photoshop.

How to Blend Two Images in Photoshop

In this video, I’m going to show you how to blend two images in Photoshop 5 easy ways. Will learn how to use the brush tool to blend images together and blend an image with the layer mask and a gradient. Blend two images on a landscape like this and use the color match tool. Blend two images with just the opacity option. And use blend modes to blend a texture over a portrait.

How to Blend Two Images Using a Gradient and the Match Color Tool

Let’s take a look at some examples where you can apply these blending techniques. In this example, I’m going to use this landscape as our main image or background image. I’m going to bring in an image. This is an image of the constellation. I’m just going to use my move tool and bring this on top of the background layer and I’m going to resize it a little bit. Command+T 0 and will resize it and position it somewhere about there. Click the checkmark. And I think I want to duplicate the background layer.

Now what we want to do is put a layer mask on this layer 1. We’re going to use the gradient tool to help us do our blending. G for the gradient tool in come up here and make sure that it says foreground to background. And at the top we should have a linear gradient selected. And opacity of 100%.

Make sure the layer one layer mask is selected. And make sure your color swatch down here is white as your foreground color and black as your background color. And hold my shift down and I’m going to drag down and see where that gets us. Over here do the same thing. Maybe I want this to come down a little further blending more. Keep on dragging till I get what I want. And something like that?

Now we’re going to use another tool to help us get the colors from the sky into the foreground. So we’re going to select the background copy layer and come here to image adjustments, match color. And this is going to help us apply the color from the sky to the foreground.

First, you have to make a selection of your source we’ll make the sky the source and you can already see the foreground, or actually, the background image here of this landscape is actually starting to take on the color of the sky.

And we can adjust that when you just say the luminance you see it’s affecting our background image. And so you can bring up the luminance so it kind of matches the brightness of the sky, Which you also have is the color intensity, I’ll bring that all the way down. You can see that the color is gone completely, but increase that to try and match the color intensity between the sky and our foreground area.

Fade, you see how it fades in the colors from the sky into our background image. So you try and match them as best you can. There’s a preview is before and there’s the after. It’s a little bit different tool to use. I’ll say OK, and that’s what it looks like.

And there’s another thing we can do. If I double click on my background copy. So bring up the blend if sliders. Now I’m going to take the slider on this top layer says this layer, I’m going to slide it over to the left and you can see at the top of these mountains over here, highlights are coming back in.

So we’re going to do is bring that slider over to something like that and we’re going to split the slider holding the alt and bringing it back over. Kind of blending it in a little bit at a time. And so I’m increasing this and it’s bringing back those highlights here at the top. So there’s a before and there’s the after. I’m going to group these two layers together in here is the before and here’s the after.

How to Blend Two Images Using Layer Opacity

One way to blend these two images together is to use the opacity option in the layers panel. We have this background image here of the ocean and another image on top of this lovely young lady. With the top image selected and here in the layers panel there’s something called opacity.

And you can change the opacity up here and as you decrease it the layer below starts to show through. And you can adjust this till the top layer is as transparent as you want it to be. And I think I like that about 60. There’s a shortcut to help you change the opacity.

With your move tool selected and using your keyboard, if I press 0 that gives me 100 opacity. If I click zero twice, that gives me zero percent opacity. And then if I click on the keyboard, the three would be 30% 6 is 60%. If I want 88% I just hit 88 real quick and so that’s a shortcut so that you can help your workflow. So that’s how you blend images using the opacity option.

How to Blend Images Using Layers and the Brush Tool.

Here’s another quick way of blending images together. We’re going to use just the brush tool. We’re going to blend these images here. This is going to be the main background layer, and we’re going to bring in these two images here. Again, just use your move tool and bring it into your main image and we’re going to resize this and you can position this where we like. Going to bring this image and also resize it and position it. Something like that.

Now to each one of those layers we added, let’s add a layer mask and we can get our brush tool. Make sure we have a soft round brush. And that our foreground color is black in our color swatch and justice brush away the areas that you don’t want to show.

Make sure your opacity and flow is at 100. It will work a lot faster that way and it does work best if you have a similar background. And if you want to add more in or you make a mistake, you can just hit the X key and paint with white in the areas that you want to come back. Go to my other layer, do the same thing.

So this is just a quick way to blend in images like this if you’re not concerned with too much detail in the background, you see that these three images are very similar and that makes it easy to. So something like this.

And next what you can do is if you need to match the color intensity of any of the images you brought in, you can put a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer above each of these layers. Use this icon right here to clip it to the layer below. And if you want to bring up the saturation on one of the images compared to the one in the middle. That’s one way of matching.

Add another Hue and Saturation above this image. And use this icon to clip it to the layer below so that my saturation adjustment only affects that image. You can see try and match, so that’s how you would use just the brush for blending in images. If I group these altogether there is the before and there’s the after.

How to Blend Two Images Using a Layer Mask and the Gradient Tool

Let’s see how we can quickly blend these two images here together. By drawing a black to white gradient on a layer mask. We are going to select our gradient tool from the toolbar. Make sure that we have our radial gradient checked here and we’re going to click on the gradient here at the top to edit. And make sure it says black to white and say OK. Let’s add our layer mask to the top layer, layer 1. Make sure you select a layer mask, and make sure this color swatch over here has black in the foreground color, white in the background color.

And I’m going to start drawing my gradient on the right hand side of the image and I want my gradient to go from black to white. So I’m going to want the right hand part of the image to show up and the left hand side of the image where the girl is actually blowing on the dandelion, I want that to stay pretty much intact. And going to fade in the image on the right hand side here.

Hold down my shift key and let go. I can do that again and have it go further over something like that. If I want to disable the layer mask and see the before, I can press the shift key and click on my layer mask. That’s how it looked before. There’s the after. And that’s using a layer mask with a gradient for blending.

How to Blend Two Images Using Blending Modes

Blending modes are good for blending 2 images together, but there are also good for blending an image with some texture. So this image here, I’ll turn on this texture layer so that you can see it. The image is in black and white. I think I want to desaturate my texture layer. I’m going to come here to image adjustments, And desaturate.

Now you’re blending options are right here in the layers panel, it’s defaulted to normal. I’m going to try multiply and see how that looks. Multiply, screen, and overlay are pretty popular. Blend modes used quite a lot. So multiply creates a darker effect. And screen creates a lighter effect. An overlay is somewhere in between, but a little bit more contrast.

So all you need to do is highlight this drop down. And you can go through each blend modes and see which one you like. Another way you can go through these blend modes is if you have the move tool selected, hold down your shift key and use your plus and minus keys an you can cycle through blend modes like this. There is overlay, maybe soft light not quite as contrasty.

And you can combine it with the opacity. So on that layer that has the texture you can decrease the opacity a little bit and make the effect a little bit less. So that is blending an image together with texture using blend modes.

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