This tutorial will show you how to use the layer mask feature of photoshop to blend different images. I have made a 400x400px canvas and added a few random 'spawn' pictures onto it. I also made the background black. Here is how they look
Now select a layer and go to Layer>Add Layer Mask>Hide All. Do this for each of the layers you want to blend. I added a layer mask to all of my picture layers that i want to blend together. Now my layers look like this
Now get a nice soft brush and select the black layer mask part of the image layer. Use the paint brush and brush around where you want the image to appear. Brushing with the white color selected will make the image appear. Brushing with black as your foreground color will make the image disappear (it will be hidden so if you make a mistake you can always swap to white and make the image reappear).
Continue to brush the other layers.... make sure you are on the black layer mask layer when you brush around. If you are not on the black layer when you brush, the actual image will be altered !!!! For a little extra feel to your images, go to Layer>Distort>Diffuse. This will brighten the images a bit. Here's what mine looks like-
And that's all there is to layer masks. You can use this technique for many other things. I use this as a lazy way to extract an image from its background. It's so much faster and easier to go back on mistakes.
