GIMP Photo Editing: Create a Photo Blend with the Gradient Tool

[Music] [Music] hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by Davies media design my name is Michael Davies and in today's tutorial I'm gonna be showing you guys how to blend two images together like you see here using the gradient tool in and this is also using a layer mask and this is a pretty simple technique but it can create a really cool result I am of course using version 2.10 point six for this tutorial which is the latest version of at the time of this recording but of course before we get into that I just want to direct you guys over to our website at Davies media design.com as always we have tons of video and text tutorials on here so definitely check that out you can also enroll in our photo editing course from beginner to pro photo retoucher on udemy and you can support our channel and help us grow by becoming a patron on patreon and you'll get some really awesome rewards in return and I'll include a link to this as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video so here is one of the photos I'll be using for today's tutorial I got this from pixabay.com for free and of course I'll include a link to this for this one I just downloaded the 1920 by 12 79 version there's also a second image I used in this tutorial and you can also download that for free on pixabay for that one I downloaded the 4000 pixel and of course I'll include a link to that in the description as well alright so for starters what you need to do is you need to open up both of these images and so go to file open and you're going to want to search for these photos on your computer in my case I know these are in the download folder in my computer and here is that image I want to use right here so I'll click open and that'll open this up as a new composition in and I've done that as well for the second image I have here and of course I can also just go to file open recent and if I've opened this file up recently I can just open it that way so the original file here was four thousand pixels as I said so I did download the larger version of this image and if you look over here at this image you can see that dimensions are 1920 by twelve seventy nine so we want to combine these two images but we want to make sure they are relatively the same size so that one of these isn't going to be huge when we bring it over into the other one but something else I'm looking at here with these images is the main subject so I want this subject to look the same size as this one and as you can tell this subject is a little bit smaller in the overall image here compared to our other subject so basically what that tells me is I have to scale this image down but I don't want to scale it all the way down to the same 1920 dimension that this image over here is so I want to leave this one a little bit larger so what I'll do is I'll go to image scale image and what I'm gonna do is just scale this down to 3,000 pixels as the width and I'll hit the tab key and that should automatically adjust the height of your image as well if you're planning on printing this you can keep this at a high resolution otherwise if you're using this for the web I recommend changing this is something like 72 pixels per inch and make sure your quality is set to no halo as the interpolation that'll just ensure that when you scale this down it'll retain a lot of the original quality so it'll keep the high quality of the image so I'll just hit scale to scale this down once I've done that there's a few options I have I can go to edit copy and that'll copy this layer and then come over here to my other composition and hit control V or go to edit paste and that will paste this as a floating selection layer click on that layer and click right here to create a new layer and that'll put this image on its own new layer now into our composition and let me delete this just to show you guys another option so another option is to come over here to our image click and drag this tab and hover it over this tab here and then with our mouse so clicked and still dragging just hover over this image here and release and that will drop my image into our other composition you can see the main difference here is that this is now called dropped buffer instead of having the original name of the image layer right here but either way those two methods are going to get your image into your other compositions so that now both of these images here are combined so over here you'll see there is a top layer called drop buffer and let me just name this winter image and hit enter and then if I hide this layer here below that is the picture of this model here and she's in the mountains so let me just rename this mountains by double-clicking on the layer so I've got my two layers here now we have to combine them so I'm gonna grab my move tool over here in my toolbox and what I'm gonna do first is I'm just going to click and drag so we could see the girl in our composition here and now the trick is we want this girl to be the same size as the girl in our image in the layer below and we can't really tell right now because when I unhide this layer you can't see the layer below it but if I grab my scale tool over here what I can do is I can click over here on our winter layer and then click with the scale tool on here and you'll see that the opacity of this image now has decreased so we could see through it it's a little bit transparent the way that I was allowed to do that is over here it's a show image preview and so while I'm scaling this image if I have this checked it will show me a preview of the scaled image so the scaled down image in our case and then we can adjust the image opacity here of that preview and that allows us to see the layer below while we scale so this gives us a better idea of the sizes of the girls in our two photos so now I'm going to grab the middle here and I can just move this over here and see how much bigger the one girl is right now than the other so as you can see her feet end a little bit higher than the other girls so what I'll do is I'll come over here to the left corner here and click and drag and that will just scale this up a little bit and I'll just scale it up until basically these two are the same height and I can come over here to the top right and click and drag and then I'll scale this up so now these two are about the same size and I could click on these Foursquare's right here to move this back into place and so I'm just kind of eyeballing this to make sure that the feet are still aligned here same with the heads and these don't have to be perfect but I'll go with that right there and just click scale and now we have our top layer here scaled down a little bit so next what I want to do is I want to add a layer mask to this because what that's going to do is it's going to allow me to non destructively add transparency to this layer and you'll see what I mean in a second so right now I will right click on here and go to add layer mask and I'm gonna choose white full opacity so I'll click Add here so that gives us a layer mask on here but it's not doing anything yet because on the layer mask white basically means full opacity and black on a layer mask is going to mean transparency so just to demonstrate this concept let me grab a paintbrush here and I have my color set to black and if I paint black on what is now my layer mask so I'm clicked on my layer mask you'll see that that's going to reveal the layer below so black is creating transparency and that is revealing what is below I'll hit control Z so if I take that concept and I apply it to a gradient so here's my gradient tool here I've got black and white set as my foreground and background color here you can click on this icon here to reset your colors and get them to black and white I'm gonna come down here to my actual gradient and click on that and make sure this goes to either foreground and background HSB or you could do foreground to background RGB either one really will work anything really where the left side is the black and the right side is going to be the white color and then make sure my shape is set to linear and now what I can do is I can click and drag and hold ctrl while I drag and what this is going to do is it's going to create a gradient where the left side here is going to be black and the right side is going to be white which means everything on the left side of our gradient is going to show through so it's going to create transparency which will show our image below and then everything on the right side will be white so it's going to show our top image here because there's no transparency here and so we're creating this blend here and because I'm in 10 I can adjust this gradient which is a live Grady until I apply it so I'm just adjusting this gradient once I have it about where I want it I can hit the answer key and that will apply my gradient what you'll see now is over here on our layer mask we have black on the left side of our layer mask that's why all this is showing below the bottom layer is showing through and then on the right side we have white and that's why our top layer is still showing on this side but of course the issue is that this photo is still somewhat centered whereas this one is way over to the right so we want these to be sort of aligned so to do that I'm going to click on my mountains layer and then I'll grab my move tool from the toolbox and I'm going to click on this mountains layer and hold ctrl while I drag to the left that's going to keep this in straight-line mode and that's going to allow me to move this photo of the model to the left a little bit and so now these are a little bit more aligned let me come back up here to my winter layer and I'm gonna make sure I'm clicked on the actual photo and not on the layer mask and then I'm going to click and just drag this photo a little bit to the left and you'll see that what this is allowing us to do is align this layer a little bit better and so that both of these images are sort of in the same place all right so that looks pretty good right here so as I mentioned the layer mask is a non-destructive form of adding transparency to a layer so what that means is that if we come back now that we have both of these images in place where we want them and we realize that we don't want the gradient in this location that it's currently in now all I have to do is come up here click on this layer mask right click and go to delete layer mask and that'll get rid of it and now we're back to our original image and then I can right click on here go back to add layer mask add that white layer mask again and then I can grab our gradient tool make sure we're still going from black to white and I can click and hold ctrl and drag this gray date and basically I can reposition this gradient based on the new location of our two images and if I want I can even swap this so if I swap the colors you'll see it's going to reverse the gradient effect that's not what we want in this case but just letting you guys know that that is an option so I'm just going to adjust this a little bit more I think that looks pretty good right there so I'll hit the answer key and now we've combined two images using a layer mask and the gradient tool here in so if I wanted to export these two images together all I have to do is go to file export as I'll just name this blended images and then I'll navigate to the location where I want to save these images and hit export turn my quality up to 100 if I want the quality all the way up or I could turn the quality down a little bit if I want to save some room maybe if I'm uploading this to a website or something and I'll hit export and there you go so that's it for this tutorial hopefully you guys liked it if you did please subscribe to my youtube channel at youtube.com slash Davey's media design you can also visit our website at Davey's media design com you can enroll in our photo editing course from beginner to pro photo retoucher on udemy and you could support our channel and help us grow by becoming a patron on patreon and I'll include a link to that as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video so thanks for watching and we'll see you next time

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 89,638

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, gimp graphic design, gimp photo editing, gimp 2018, GIMP 2.10, GIMP, basics, blend photos, blend images, GIMP Photo Editing, Beginner Photo Editing, Beginner GIMP Tutorial, GIMP for Beginners, GIMP 2.10.6, Scale Tool, Move Tool, Layer Masks, Photo Blend, photo merger, merge pictures, merge photos, combine pictures, photoshop blend

Id: HEPLeMxVE2Q

Length: 11min 34sec (694 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 25 2018