blending photo

Jenny’s little pirate is looking adorable in his hat and painted mustache. Jenny incorporates several of the latest trends in digital scrapbooking to come up with a page that pops.

Shapes Cut Out from a Background Paper – Cutting out circle from the neutral kraft background so the red shows through for a bit of color pop is a great use of the current ‘cut out’ craze.
Blended Photo - Blending is back with a vengeance and throughout the gallery you’ll pages incorporating a main photo duplicated, enlarged and blended into the background paper as sort of an ‘echo’ of the key image. Jenny uses the technique well here to add some visual interest to the kraft background while still keeping the focus on the main cluster.
Mismatched Frames - If there is a trend in framing; it is that anything goes. Large chunky frames, doodled frames, vintage frames, grab them all – on the same page if you want. Here Jenny combines and traditional square frame, a stylized circle frame and a third photo with no frame at all for a fun, playful result.

Jenny used Black Pearl to create her page. Click on the layout to see it in the SSD Gallery with full credits.

SUBJECT: Blending a photo into a background page

PROGRAM: PSE8 (can be adapted for other versions of PSE, notes provided for Photoshop)

PREREQUISITES: Familiarity with layers and the layers palette, dragging and dropping photos and elements onto a page and resizing

Start by downloading and unzipping the complimentary background paper and clipping mask to use as you go through this tutorial. Download here.

Start PSE/Photoshop and open the background paper and clipping mask. Click on the clipping mask and drag it onto the background paper canvas. Position the clipping mask so the straight edge is flush with one of the canvas edges.

Open the photo you want to use and drag it onto your canvas.

Resize the photo so that covers the clipping mask.

The next step is to ‘clip’ your photo to the photo mask. In Photoshop, right click on the photo layer in the layers palette and select ‘Create Clipping Mask’ from the drop down menu. In Photoshop Element, use keystroke Ctrl+G.

Right click on the photo layer in the layers palette and select ‘Merge Down’ from the drop down menu.

With the photo layer active, click on the small arrow next to the word ‘normal’ in the layers palette and select ‘Hard Light’ from the drop down menu.

You may want to play with the contrast in your photo. To do so in PSE8, go to Enhance>Adjust Lighting>Brightness/Contrast. In Photoshop go to Image>Adjustments>Brightness/Contrast.

Adjust the sliders as desired and click OK.

To further lighten your photo, lower the opacity slider at the top of the layers palette.

The above three instructions (the hard light blend mode, brightness/contrast adjustment and low opacity) are just some of several possible blending recipes. You can refine your look by playing with other blending modes such as Overlay, Pin Light and Luminosity. Additionally you can duplicate the photo layer and set each photo layer at different blend modes and opacity until you find just the right look for your page.

If there are still parts of your photo that you don’t want, use a large soft eraser brush on the photo layer to remove them.

The background paper is easily recolorable. To do so, click on the background layer in the layers palette to set it as the active layer. In PSE go to Enhance>Adjust Color>Adjust Hue/Saturation. In PS, go to Image>Adjustment>Hue/Saturation.

Move the Hue slider to see the background at various colors. Click OK when you are happy with the color.

Embellish your page as desired.

Layout Credits: Blending Masks and Whispered Backgrounds by Misty Cato, black paper and leaves from Urban Kids, flowers (recolored) from Adoration.

Inspiration from Jenny

Blending Made Easy

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