 Hello everybody, welcome back to another Dolby Photoshop tutorial. In this one, I'm gonna show you how to combine images or blend images is the better way to put it. And I'm gonna show you what I'm talking about here. I've got this neat little beach scene here, I have a top down of a beach, but what they don't know is there's a shark that's the size of the whole beach, right? So there's a shark on top and I wanna blend that shark in with the beach and make it look kind of movie poster-ish, kind of believable. Let me show you what I got here. Bang, there we go. We've got the shark, it sort of blends in here and we've got the original bottom part of the beach and then we've got, I mean, if I turn the shark layer off, you'll see the bottom layer and then we add the shark on top and you'll see that it's kind of blended in and you'll especially see it in this layer mask here, which I'm going to show you because it's dark and then there's white parts and then there's like blended parts. So let me show you how the heck to do this. And in fact, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start from scratch. I'm gonna delete everything and we'll go from the very first step. So let's just get going. All right, Photoshop is open. Go to your Finder. If you're on a PC, go to your Explorer and drag and drop in your bottom layer. In this case, we're gonna go with that bottom layer being the beach top down look. So here's our bottom layer, great. Okay, I'm gonna unlock it. All that's not required, it's just a habit. Okay, beach is loaded in. Now we wanna add in the second image which we want to blend with the bottom image. So I'm gonna drag and drop in our shark and presto, on goes the shark and let's see what we got. Okay, pretty good, but the shark is, maybe we need to make it a little bigger. So I'm just gonna pull on this right corner a little bit and something like, I don't know, something like that. What do you think? I'm gonna make it so the shark's nose is kinda near the top. Okay, you guys can of course adjust this as you see fit but this looks pretty good. This reminds me of the Jaws poster. And then when I'm happy, I'll just hit Enter and Presto. Now we've gone ahead, I'm gonna click out and here we go, beach layer on the bottom, shark layer on the top. And what do you get when you combine a beach and a shark, a burk. Yep, not a good joke, but that's all I got. So anyways, now we've got our two images in. Click on the top image and next you need to click on this layer mask button. We're going to add a layer mask. It's going to be white and that's fine. There's nothing going on there. It just means we've got a white layer mask. We're going to work on that. Next, I'm gonna go up here to the left side and I'm gonna grab the gradient tool. It's this one right here and just a heads up. Right now I've got foreground of white, background color of black. If these are reversed, you're gonna see different things in here. So just keep this at white and black for now in case you get mixed up. It's a small thing, but you might see things a little differently. What we're looking for however, is this one here. Look at this, it says black to transparent or alternatively, you'll see one that says right here, it'll say foreground to transparent. And I was wrong, the foreground color should be black, not white, that was my mistake. So there we go, we've got foreground to transparent. I've got this one clicked on. I'm gonna select it, and what it basically means is it goes from black to transparent in this case. Black to transparent. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm just gonna click on the top of this image and I'm gonna try and just pull this down here, pull it down through the center and you're gonna see that this is kind of blending in the top and the bottom. So we've blended in the top a little bit. It's not correct yet, but you can see what we're working on here. And then I'm gonna go ahead and draw another one from the bottom to the top. So here we go and this will go up something like, let's go with something like that. Okay, good. So you'll see on the right side now that our layer mask has black at the top, gray to whiteish to gray to black. So it's kind of got this gradient going on as it should. Here's the original image and kick note, there's these three weird dark splotches on the sand here. When I turn this on, it actually makes the shark look a little bit like a rocket. Okay, so there's a chance that's all you need to do for what you're going for, but I'm gonna show you some more advanced techniques while I have you. So I'm gonna switch out of tools. I'm gonna go back to my layer mask, make sure that the layer mask is selected. You'll see four lines around the edges, in case so you know which one's selected. And now what we're gonna do is we're gonna grab the brush tool. Go over here, grab the brush tool. Again, making sure you've got black and white selected. What I'm going to do is I'm going to select the brush. So I'm gonna create, I'm gonna select a soft round brush. This is pretty important for this type of, when you're doing blending, you want a softer brush, not a harder brush, unless you're blending vectors. And you don't do that in Photoshop much. So there you go. We've got a soft round brush selected. And I'm gonna go ahead and change the opacity from the default of 100, which is heavy duty to about 25%. Let's go to 30% just because I wanna go quickly and show you the technique as opposed to getting it perfect. So I'm gonna go to opacity of 30%, but you wanna have it quite a bit less than 100 because we're doing some delicate refining work. Now, we've got our soft round brush selected. We've got our opacity to about 30%. Now watch what I do here. I'm just gonna go ahead and brush over top of this shark. But in this case, I'm gonna go ahead and brush with white. So instead of brushing with black, which is the default, I just gonna switch this here to white. And now I'm brushing with the foreground color of white. Watch what happens to the little sharky. I'm gonna go ahead and add in some details to this shark. So you see what's happening? You'll see the shark's teeth are coming out a little bit more. And if you look over here on the right side, you'll see here that it's starting to work on the inside part of the shark, but everything else is not kind of getting blended. So I'm just going ahead and adding in a little bit more to the shark. So I'm just making him a little bit more obvious or her. It's hard to tell their gender. Plus it's 2023, so you never really know. So we've got this shark here. I'm just blending in the shark a little bit. And again, you guys can do this as you see fit. I'm gonna do it a fair bit here around the teeth and maybe a little more around the face here and something like that, okay? So there we go. There we go. So there we go. We've kind of drawn in and we've blended in a bit more of this shark look. And to top it off, now let's say the bottom of the image right down here, I want less of the shark blended in and I want more of the original sandy beach here. So here's the original shot. I want more of that at the bottom. So what do I do? I'm gonna switch to black and I'm just gonna kind of hover over and just blend this in a little bit better. So you'll see here more of the original image is coming in and a little bit less of the shark. So just a nice simple thing here. And I mean, off we go. The other thing I want to show you is let's go right up to here. So we've kind of got this little bit of a blend here. There's the original. Here is a hold down shift and I click on the left click on it. I can cancel the layer mask. Here's the shark shift click. This is what the blend looks like so far. It's pretty good, but if you really want to go a little further, you can actually go ahead and change in like the edges here. Like this should have dark down kind of to that water edge. So I'm gonna press X and I'm just flipping this over here and I'm gonna get white and watch this. I'm just gonna kind of blend that in a little bit and then I might blend that part in a little bit. And literally by doing that, that's how you go ahead and combine blend images using layer masks, gradients and brushwork. Thanks for watching.