Blending Effects in Photoshop

Blending can be a great Photoshop effect that makes your images look fantastic. This image below had a boring grey background before I added in the wood behind them.

The first thing you need to do is choose which images you will be blending together and make any edits necessary. I choose this fitness couple and a wooden texture, which just so happens to be the floor in my apartment.

Pull your desired background into the same document as your main subject and place the background layer on top. Change the Blending Mode to either Overlay or Soft Light. Play around and see which mode works best for your image.

I chose Overlay, which makes my two images blend together like this.

The background looks great, but I don’t want that texture on their faces so I’m going to put a layer mask on the background layer (which is still on top) and mask out the models using the Brush Tool. Here’s how it looks so far. Almost done.

Now I’m going to add textures/colors using the Color Lookup Adjustment Layer. You’ll find it under the Adjustment Layers in the bottom right corner. There are a lot of preset filters you can choose from. They all start out very intense, just drop the opacity down until it looks better. I added three different Color Lookup Layers, (Fuji 2393, filmstock and Edgy Amber,) which turned my image into this.

While this looks pretty cool, I don’t like how much color is on my models. To fix this, I grouped my Color Lookup Adjustment Layers into a single folder and added a Layer Mask to that folder. Then I used the Brush Tool at about 80% to mask out my models. This is how my final image turned out.

For more tips on Photoshop effects and blending watch this video