JoeDios.com Forums - View Single Post - Advanced : The Art of Cut N Paste by Master Outrider

*cont'd*

The final touch is to now go back to pic 1 again, and trace the entire canopy, including the glass, and paste that over the canopy in your composite picture. Then, before saving the picture, choose the command View/Show Layers. A box will come up which will show the background pic and the pasted canopy as separate layers. Double click on the canopy layer and a dialogue box appears with two choices; Opacity and Blend. Click on Opacity and change it from 100% to whatever opacity looks best. I used 20% on this occasion. Click OK and close the Layers selection box, and you now have a transparent canopy through which you can see the background photo (Pic 5).

The next helpful trick is blending layers. Picture 6 below is one I posted a while back. I want to make it look a little more interesting, so I will add a blended layer to make it look like it is still raining. Using Adobe Photodeluxe, draw some light grey spots on a black background. Then use the Effects/Blur/Motion Blur command to stretch the dots out to make them look like falling rain (Pic 7).

Once this is done, simply copy the entire picture and pasted it onto picture six. Next, again select the commands View/Show Layers to bring up the layer selection box as above. After double clicking the rain layer, select the Blend option, and choose Lighten. This makes the black background disappear, leaving just the rain drops (Pic 8).

The other choices in this box do different things. Darken will make a white background disappear, leaving everything else. Overlay, Difference and Colour all have other effects. Rather than me explain them all, play around with them to find out what they do.
The best way to get the most out of your photo editing software is to just experiment and see what happens. That’s how I learnt these tricks. You may find some new tricks to post here in the How-To forums!

10-02-2006, 09:17 AM	#2
Sonneilon aka 'Paul WS Anderson' ;) Offline --> Posts: 7,751 --> Join Date: Jul 2005	cont'd The final touch is to now go back to pic 1 again, and trace the entire canopy, including the glass, and paste that over the canopy in your composite picture. Then, before saving the picture, choose the command View/Show Layers. A box will come up which will show the background pic and the pasted canopy as separate layers. Double click on the canopy layer and a dialogue box appears with two choices; Opacity and Blend. Click on Opacity and change it from 100% to whatever opacity looks best. I used 20% on this occasion. Click OK and close the Layers selection box, and you now have a transparent canopy through which you can see the background photo (Pic 5). The next helpful trick is blending layers. Picture 6 below is one I posted a while back. I want to make it look a little more interesting, so I will add a blended layer to make it look like it is still raining. Using Adobe Photodeluxe, draw some light grey spots on a black background. Then use the Effects/Blur/Motion Blur command to stretch the dots out to make them look like falling rain (Pic 7). Once this is done, simply copy the entire picture and pasted it onto picture six. Next, again select the commands View/Show Layers to bring up the layer selection box as above. After double clicking the rain layer, select the Blend option, and choose Lighten. This makes the black background disappear, leaving just the rain drops (Pic 8). The other choices in this box do different things. Darken will make a white background disappear, leaving everything else. Overlay, Difference and Colour all have other effects. Rather than me explain them all, play around with them to find out what they do. The best way to get the most out of your photo editing software is to just experiment and see what happens. That’s how I learnt these tricks. You may find some new tricks to post here in the How-To forums!