I’m often asked, “how do I blend photos into the background when I’m designing albums?” The simple answer is, gradients. But people often don’t know how gradients work in Photoshop. Luckily, using gradients in Photoshop is one of the easier features in Photoshop.
Here is an example of how I took a photo on one page of an album design and then blended the photo into the background. You can see how the photo on the right side of the design has very hard edged and the dark gray wall does not blend well with the black. We can use gradients to create smooth transitions from the photo into black, thereby giving it a much cleaner look.
You can see that after using two gradients, the photo blends completely into the back ground. Let me take you step by step on how to do this on Photoshop.
- Make sure your foreground color is the same color as the background. (If you are unsure about how to do this please see my previous post here.)
- Select the Gradient Tool. You can see it selected here.
- Next you want to make sure you have your gradient tool settings correct. You want it to be your color to transparent, and I like to work with the reverse checkbox checked.
- Make sure you are on the correct layer of the photo you want blended into the background.
- The first three steps take about 5 seconds and this last step takes about the same. Select the area where you want the gradient to start. And while holding down the ‘shift’ key (this keeps the gradient straight). Click and drag out to the edge of the photo. You can see the example here. The small “X” is where I started, and the line is the direction of the gradient.
- Do the same to the other side. And you are done.
That’s it. It is a very simple process and after you do it a couple of times, it will become second nature. If you would like to play around with album designs such as these, along with gradients, feel free to download the free 14-day trial of the Fundy Album Builder at www.fundysos.com
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