August Mom
06-21-2005, 04:20 PM
What am I doing wrong?
I'm trying to make a montage of photos for the front of DS's birthday party invitation. I'm not doing a collage where all the photos are cropped to a certain size. Rather, I'm taking 1 photo as the background and adding other photos to it, then using the gradient tool to remove any harsh lines. However, I can't seem to get this process to work with more than the background photo and 1 other photo.
Here's what I'm doing:
1. Open background photo, turn off maximize mode
2. Open 2nd photo & use move tool to drag it onto the background (making a layer)
3. Hold control key and create a new layer
4. Control G to group photo with layer beneath
5. Press D to set foreground color to black
6. Switch to gradient tool and choose foreground to transparent
7. Activate blank layer.
8. Click gradient tool and drag toward center of document
But, when I open another photo and drag it onto the background and attempt to repeat, I can't see what I'm doing except in the layers palette and it seems to black everything out. Am I messing up the way I'm grouping it?
The idea was to put a bunch of photos there. Am I messing it up because I'm cropping the photos first and I need them to be the same height as the background photo? (And hence am probably limited to 3 photos).
Any thoughts would be appreciated. I'm using The Photoshop Elements 3 Book for Digital Photographers by Scott Kelby to guide me, FWIW.
TIA
I'm trying to make a montage of photos for the front of DS's birthday party invitation. I'm not doing a collage where all the photos are cropped to a certain size. Rather, I'm taking 1 photo as the background and adding other photos to it, then using the gradient tool to remove any harsh lines. However, I can't seem to get this process to work with more than the background photo and 1 other photo.
Here's what I'm doing:
1. Open background photo, turn off maximize mode
2. Open 2nd photo & use move tool to drag it onto the background (making a layer)
3. Hold control key and create a new layer
4. Control G to group photo with layer beneath
5. Press D to set foreground color to black
6. Switch to gradient tool and choose foreground to transparent
7. Activate blank layer.
8. Click gradient tool and drag toward center of document
But, when I open another photo and drag it onto the background and attempt to repeat, I can't see what I'm doing except in the layers palette and it seems to black everything out. Am I messing up the way I'm grouping it?
The idea was to put a bunch of photos there. Am I messing it up because I'm cropping the photos first and I need them to be the same height as the background photo? (And hence am probably limited to 3 photos).
Any thoughts would be appreciated. I'm using The Photoshop Elements 3 Book for Digital Photographers by Scott Kelby to guide me, FWIW.
TIA