The long awaited Part 2 of PST. The second tutorial is: Blending two images together on top of each other, an example would be a television screen and the sea, as used in this tutorial. As I started this tutorial, I saw that the main purpose was not to add an effect, but rather just simply combine what you already have at your disposal together into a single image. For this tutorial you need to find two, not one, images. To follow the tutorial correctly, you want to find a great picture of a television from the same angle as a landscape or a family photo because the two pictures will be overlayed upon each other. Chad Neuman, the creator of this tutorial, wants to express the feeling of an image on a Television that is being displayed realistically. I once again browsed Google, and found this. I thought that this was a great head on view that would be easy to work with. I then simply found another picture from the same angle. After saving both of the pictures to my hard drive (so as not to leech bandwidth from their sites) I opened up my trusty photoshop.

Once you open both pictures in Photoshop, drag the larger photo (the one that will be on the inside of the screen) onto the picture of the television. First, you want to make sure that your tv screen is transparent. You do this simply by selecting the magic wand tool and clicking on the white part of the television screen layer. The flaw in this is, following the tutorial you are left with a locked background layer. An easy way to fix it is to simply duplicate the television layer (ctrl + j) and then use your magic wand tool to select the white, and then press the delete button. If for some reason this does not work, you can use the marquee tool to select portions and delete them individually. Now, you completely ignore the original background layer, making background copy your television layer, and layer 1 your scenery picture. Hide the background layer by clicking on the eye. When you drag your scenery picture on top of your TV screen picture, chances are it is gigantic or very small. To resize it, press ctrl + t on your keyboard and use the corners to expand or shrink the image. I explained it because in the tutorial it assumes you already have the corners on the picture selected, which may not be the case. As you work on step 9, you want to make sure that when you select the pen tool that you have the shape layer feature enabled. After that, it is VERY self explanatory. Once you finish, you may notice the image being slightly dark. This is cured by selecting a very light image, as the author did. I finished following his tutorial exactly with this. However, after careful inspection one can see that the image is not very pleasing to the eye, and so I had to adjust. Anyone reading this and working through the tutorial should note there are ways to fix darkening of an image. I prefer to set the layer to normal, duplicating, making the duplicated overlay, lowering it to around 33%, and erasing the darkest parts using a 20 soft pxl eraser. After those adjustments I ended up with this fabulous image.

In conclusion, Chad Neuman did an excellent job creating this tutorial. It was very easy to follow, yet most of his tutorial had only to do with the image he used, instead of the tutorial being applicable to any image. I thank him for his time and effort he put into it, and I also thank Photoshop Tutorials for their wonderful tutorials.

The first tutorial is titled: How to Create a Fog Effect on Any Nature Image. I had to find a landscape or forest walkway for this picture, so i browsed Google, and ended up choosing this. I dragged it into Photoshop, and started working through the tutorial. In the beginning you have to mess with the layer pallet, so if it’s not already open, go to window>layer. The new adjustment editor is the white and black circle on the bottom of the palette. These were the only things I discovered that might trouble new users:

• On Step 8: the foreground is the part closest to the camera, for those of you who don’t know. After that point most of it was self-explanatory.

Using their tutorial, I ended up with this. As you can see, the effect in the tutorial result is a bit overdone, and extremely fake looking. After a bit of adjustment, such as lowering the opacity, erasing with a texturized brush, and messing with the layer order, and ended up with a more realistic-looking image. All in all this tutorial is amazing to learn about new layers and how to add layer masks. But in reality it’s a mediocre result, leaving you with a completely fake-looking image, which defeats the purpose.