1. BLISSFUL LANDSCAPE PHOTO MANIPULATION Create a breath taking scenery by combining two photos and applying several photo effects. When you follow this Photoshop tutorial, you’ll learn masking techniques and several photo effects Today Tutorial Blissful Landscape Photo Manipulation Photoshop Tutorial: To Be Completed As Instructed By Teacher

2. Preview of final results Before Effect

3. Preview of final results Rollover the image below to see the before and after effect. After Effect

4. Stock photos used for this tutorial For this tutorial, we used two royalty-free images from Dreamstime.com. They are not free but you can use other similar photos of your own or from free stock photography websites such as sxc.hu . If you choose to use the same images we used, we recommend that you use the medium sized or larger images.

5. Step 1 – Open the landscape photo Start by opening the landscape photo into Photoshop.

6. Step 2 – Place the photo of the seagulls Place the picture of the seagulls into the photo. To do this, choose File > Place, browse for the image file, select it then click OK. It will place the image into your current document with a transform tool activated like shown below. You can resize the image if you feel the need to but it is better if you do that later. Press Enter on your keyboard to exit out of the transform tool.

7. Step 3 – Create a selection of the seagulls Use the Magic Wand or Quick Selection tool to create a selection of the seagulls. Try to make the selection as accurate as possible. The seagulls in the distance are blurry so make sure that your selection covers the blurred edges. If you’re using Photoshop CS3 or later, you usually can use the “Refine Edge” tool in to refine the edges of the selection. However, in this case, we cannot use it because all the seagulls have a different edge softness. Instead, we’ll need to refine the edges manually using a variety of tools you’ll learn about after the next step.

10. Step 5 – Correct the edge sharpness We’ll begin by correcting the edge sharpness of the seagull in the front. Right now, it looks too sharp so we’ll give it a slight blur with the gaussian blur tool. Choose Filter > Modify > Blur then adjust the radius setting so that the edge of the seagull in the front blends in with background. Don’t worry about the other seagulls because their edges are already blurred. Click OK when done.

11. Here’s how the edges should look like after applying the gaussian blur filter.

13. Edit only the front seagull that is in focus. Zoom in to about 500% then use the brush tool to fill in any gaps. If you have any protruding edges, you can use the eraser tool with the same settings as the brush

15. With the proper brush size all set up, begin erasing the edge of the seagull.

16. Repeat this step for the rest of the seagulls. Because you already have the brush hardness set to 0%, you can conveniently change the brush size of the eraser by pressing the [ or ] keys on your keyboard. Press the [ key to reduce the brush size or ] to increase. Here’s what my image looks like afterwards.