Video:Elements Tutorial: How to Combine Two Pictures

Transcript:Elements Tutorial: How to Combine Two Pictures

Hi, this is Kendal for About.com, and today we are going to take a look at combining two photos, using Adobe Photoshop Elements Ten.

Use the Select Tool to Combine Pictures

With your edit browser open the first thing you want to do is have both the pictures you want to combine in your project bin down at the bottom.  There are many different ways to combine photos for many different purposes.  I will show you the most common and easiest.

We want to take this dock and put it in the foreground, but simply change out the background with this other picture.  So select your foreground and go over to your Quick Selection tool and select that.  I am going to click in the upper left hand corner and drag the selection tool along a path to select the entire background.  If the tool does not select everything, simply go over into an unselected area and drag that over until it merges with the previous selection.

Create a New Layer

Now that your background is selected go up to select, and inverse your selection.  Now instead of your background being selected, your foreground is selected. Head up to layer and select Layer, Layer via Copy.

Now you have a new layer that is only the dock.  Click off the original background and you can see it all alone, with a transparent background.

From here it’s smooth sailing.  Go to your project bin and click and hold the new background and drag it up to the cut out of your dock.  Size it how you want and then go over to your layers panel and move the foreground layer a head of the back ground layer.

You have now changed the background, by combining to photos and you can move it around however you like in the frame.

Thank you for watching and for more tutorials and information about Adobe Photoshop Elements Ten, be sure to check us out, on the web, at About.com.