PHotosHoP CC: tHe MIssInG MAnUAL276

LAYER BLENd MOdES

button, Photoshop plops the gradient into the layer mask, which effectively fades your images together. If you’re not happy with the gradient, just keep clicking and dragging until you get it right; Photoshop updates the mask auto-matically. To empty the mask and start over, click the mask’s 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 document’s 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 you’re finished.

Layer Blend ModesPerched 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. (Un-less 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 blend-mode 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 Edit→Fade right after you run a filter (see the box on page 461) or apply any of the adjustments in the Image→Adjustments menu.

CHAPteR 7: COMBINING IMAGES 277

LAYER BLENd MOdES

FiGURE 7-7Here’s what Photoshop’s 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 happy- face image were on top instead.)

It’s 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, they’re worth their weight in gold when you’re combining im-ages, whether you’re using them to produce a darker or lighter version (page 113) or creating a complex collage (page 281).

• In the Options bar when you’re 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 book’s Missing CD page at www.missingmanuals.com/cds.)