Photo Editing: Layering for dummies

Stacy over at Visual Venturing hosts the After Before challenge and we all love her for it.  🙂

Though I have looked at Photoshop layering a number of times I have never been able to get any joy; I’ve never been able to figure it out.  HOWever, a fellow blogger pointed me towards Pixlr where even I have had some measure of success.  I don’t know if I did this in the shortest number of steps, but I did it. I started with these two photos:

I made sure the images were the same size (because it wasn’t working for me when they weren’t).  First I played with the river shot in Sagelight, adjusting lighting and detail until I arrived at this:

I loaded this version into Pixlr.  Then under the tab “Layer” I selected “open image as layer” and loaded the image of the geese. With the move tool I positioned it and adjusted the opacity slider so it looked like this:

I didn’t like the white flare of clouds that came with the geese and so took the geese shot into Sagelight and used the clone tool to remove the cloud, and then layered the adjusted version over the river shot for this:

Still some flare but I took this image into Sagelight and cloned it out, along with the geese in front of the trees. Also adjusted the lighting again, and removed the blue cast.  As a result of the layering the geese had a yellow tinge.  My fix for this was to use the threshold option in Sagelight which worked well.  This is my finished image.  Ta Da!  I actually layered something.

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