TUTORIAL | GRADIENT BLENDING

 

Hello my friends!  Pink Lady Esther here with you again!  I'm bringing you another tutorial. Today I'm going to talk blending with you. Blending is a technique that I actually use quite frequently.  There are so many ways to blend phots/elements/objects.  Blend modes within Photoshop and PhotoShop Elements are probably the most common way that blending is done. I mean who doesn't like clicking or selecting an option and then "poof" there it is!  I'm going to take blending a little further.  How much further you ask? How about GRADIENT blending.

What is gradient blending?  It is a blending technique that one can use to blend their photo pretty seamlessly.  You can use it to blend 2 photos together to create one look, blend a photo into the background to create your own custom background or maybe there's a piece of the photo you don't want visible, it's a good way to "hide" portions of a photo without fully masking it or having a hard cut line.

I'm going to walk you through using gradient blending in PhotoShop Elements 2021 (process is very similar in PhotoShop 2022.  I'm essentially recreating a layout that I made prior, so I will be using  Pink Reptile Designs " Good Times Bundle.  I did use template No 1 for the base of my layout, please note that I modified the template a little bit to meet my needs for my layout.

This is the photo that I am going to use for my gradient blending.

As I started my layout and started placing the photos, this is what the layout looked like.

I think we can all agree....."ummm no" to this look. I could either ditch the photo, make it smaller or find a way to make this large photo work.  I personally love this photo of my son and I wanted it to be star of the layout BUT I didn't want to take away from the other photo spots either. This is when I decided that gradient blending was the solution to my problem.

The first thing you want to do with gradient blending is to select the layer that you want to blend.  In my case, I want to blend this photo.  So I have selected this photo layer in Photoshop.

Once the layer is selected, you then want to add a "layer mask" to it"--if you look at the photo layer, you can see the mask has been added by the linked white square that is right next to the photo in my layer.  You also want to make sure your color foreground is set to white.

Once these 2 steps are complete, click on the layer mask that was just added. ***The layer mask has to be selected for the gradient blending to work***

 Next click on the gradient tool and take a look at the bottom to see the additional options that pop up.

If you notice there are different gradient options from patterns for your gradient and the opacity.  Feel free to play with these to achieve the desired look of your choosing.  For my layout, I left the gradient pattern as linear and didn't change any of the other settings.  The Linear approach allows a real seamless blending.  The next step can be a little tricky and it really is a "try it and see" to achieve the level of blend that you desire.  To do the actual blending you then want to take  your cursor and hover over the layer that your blending, click and pull your cursor in the direction that you  want  blended.  For example: if you want the top edge blended, you would hover your cursor over any area beneath the top edge and then pull the cursor up and release.

Roughly where the blue "x" is where I hovered the cursor, I clicked once and drug my cursor straight up to the top edge.

I didn't like this look  for this photo, so I re-did the blend mode.  Here's the beauty of gradient blending.  You don't have to hit undo and start over.  All you do is hover over a new starting point, click and drag your cursor in that direction.  So for this look , I hovered and clicked near the left edge (see the blue "x") and drug my cursor and stopped in the middle of the photo on the right.  I did that to ensure that the right edge of my photo that I'm blending, would really blend smoothly into the background.

If you notice, in the photo, my son is a little blended more than I really wanted.  I solved that issue by actually extracting him and then layering that extraction on top of this layer. (I actually did the same with the phone as well).  By doing this, I was able to keep the important details of the photo while still making the blend look seamless and flow with the other photos.

Once I completed my layout, here's the end result.

Somethings to keep in mind:
1. You can do a  gradient blend diagonally
2. The closer you click the cursor to the edge of the direction you want to blend, the less blend action you will see.  To see the actual blending, the blending  needs some space to do its job. (hopefully that makes sense, if it doesn't, please drop a comment below so that we can respond).
3. You can only apply one gradient blend effect at a time.  So if you want to blend more than one side of a layer, you must blend in steps.  Meaning, apply your first gradient blend effect, right click-simplify layer and then apply the gradient blend to the other area you want to blend.  ****Keep in mind if you don't like the results you will have to start from the beginning, this is a little more advanced technique***
4. After you do a gradient blend, you can still apply the regular blend modes in photoshop if you choose--it's all in the look you are trying to achieve.

Hope you enjoyed this tutorial.  Hope you also have fun trying out some gradient blending!