Blending a photo into the background in Paint Shop Pro

Blending a Photo into the background
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By Daphne Whitley
A lot of times you want the edges of your photos on your digital layout to be crisp
and clean, framed with nice lines, and perfectly shadowed so that they just pop
off of the page. Sometimes, though, you’d rather have your photo blend with the
paper behind it. Depending on the way you do your blending, you can achieve
either a flowing look that keeps the picture sharp or a dreamy look.
I use three different methods to blend pictures into the background in Paint Shop
Pro XI. You can use each of these methods individually or combine them to
come up with whatever type of blending suits your needs. Are you ready? Let’s
get started.
First, supplies needed:
• A picture that you want to blend
• A background paper that’s suitable to blend – honestly, you can blend
anything, but for most pictures, and most situations, a solid background
works best. For this tutorial, I’ll be using Amy Leigh Fennel’s Shades of
the Sea papers
Now, on to the blending
The steps below are the same for all three methods.
1. Open your background paper
2. Open the picture that you want to blend
3. Copy your picture onto your background page by taking the following steps on
your open picture file:
a. Press CTRL+A
b. Press CTRL+C
c. Switch to your background page
d. Press CTRL+L
4. You should now have a two-layer project - one layer with the background paper
and one with the picture.
Method 1 – Selecting And Feathering
This method will blur the edges of your picture. Instead of having a harsh line
between you picture and the background, the two layers will seem to flow into
each other.
1. Pick your selection tool.
2. In the tool options palette, set the Feathering to 200 (you can change the
feathering settings to anything from 0 to 200 to get the effect you want – 200
gives you the greatest amount of blurring).
3. Using your selection tool, select almost all of your picture. As soon as you
release the mouse, your marching ants will appear farther outside of the picture
than you selected – don’t worry, that’s just the part that’s going to be feathered.
4. Now, invert the selection by picking Selections on the top menu, then Invert.
(Keyboard shortcut is CTRL+SHIFT+I)
(Now you can see where your original selection was! )
5. Now, press the delete key.
There you have it – a picture blurred into the background. You can stop here or
go on to learn how to give it a softer, dreamy appearance.
Method 2 – Working With Masks
If you’re still here, let’s learn about using Masks to blend. You can use this
method without going through the steps in Method 1, but since we’ve already
done them, let’s just continue from there. Choose Selections, then None
(keyboard shortcut: Ctrl + D)
Make sure that you have your picture layer selected.
1. Select Layers, then New Mask Layer, then Show All
Your layer palette will now look like this.
2. Now, we’re going to paint on our mask. What? We’re going to paint? – How’s
that going to blend our photo? Well, the truth is – I don’t know – all I can tell
you is it works wonderfully! When you’re painting on the mask, the only color
options available to you are black, white, and shades of gray. If you paint with
all black, the pixel that you paint on becomes completely transparent; if you
paint with white, the entire pixel remains solid. Shades of gray give you varying
levels of transparency.
3. Let’s click on the foreground box and change our paint color to something that
will give us partial transparency.
4. I’m going to pick Palette index 123 – a color that’s a bit on the blacker shade of
gray.
5. Click OK to close the color selector window.
6. Let’s start painting! Select the Paint Brush Tool. Since we’re not too worried
about being exact, we can make the size of the brush pretty large. And, since
we’re going for a kind of dreamy look, we want to set the hardness of the brush
to a fairly low setting. I’ve used 295 for the size and 22 for the hardness.
Experiment with different settings to achieve different looks – the sky’s the limit
with these masks!
7. Now, paint away until you’ve achieved the look that you want.
8. Once you’re happy with the look you’ve achieved, click on the Group Layer and
then merge the group. Click Layers, then Merge, then Group. Now, you’ve got
a beautifully blended photo! Once again, you can stop here or go on to the
final method to get an even dreamier look.
Method 3 – Changing Opacity
This is the easiest method of blending and if you’re looking for a softer, dreamy
look and your background paper is close in color to your original picture, this is
sometimes all you need to do. Since we’ve already done the other methods on
this picture, we’re just going to add this method to the other two.
1. Select the layer that has your picture on it and simply pull the opacity slider
down until you find a level that you like.
Now, you’ve got a dreamy blended picture. Now, you can experiment with size
and placement of your photo, add elements, add text – whatever you want! I’m
going to add some text and play with the opacity a bit more and come up with my
final layout. We’ve gone from this:
To this!