Blending tutorial for beginners - made in photoshop CS2 - transferable
We will be using this and this to make 
This tutorial will cover:
• cropping
• blending
• screen layers
• sharpening
I opened the first picture:
cropped the first picture. I used the cropping tool, and in the tool bar selected the dimensions 100 by 100. This gives the correct dimensions for when you resize the picture for the icon:
I then dragged the cropping tool over the picture, to crop the part of the picture I wanted for the icon and clicked the tick box to crop it:
go to image, image size and check the size of the picture, the picture is 352 pixels. Now open your second picture, check its height. It is higher than the other picture so resized it so they were the same height 352 pixels. This helps keep the body and face sizes in relative proportion to each other.
On your second picture hit ‘ctrl a’ this will select the entire picture.
Then hit ‘ctrl c’ and this will copy the picture
Return to your first picture and hit ‘ctrl v’ this will paste the second picture on top of the first picture in a new layer.
Use the move button and position the layer where you want the second picture to be on the icon
I placed the picture to the right hand side so as not to obscure the other persons face:
Then I used the magic wand button:
I clicked it over the background around the person in layer two and hit ‘ctrl x’ to remove the background:
This fortunately took the background away. If there was any part of the background left, I would use the eraser tool to take the other parts away
Then I right clicked on top later, and selected merge visible:
Its time to resize the blended picture to icon size!
Go to image, image size and put in 100 by 100 pixels, hit okay:
As you can see the colours to the two people are very different. I merge the layers so I could do the following. Go to image -> adjustment -> auto colour. Then image -> adjustment -> auto contrast and image -> adjustment -> auto levels:
Now the picture’s colour is a little better.
The icon is a little dark so I hit ‘ctrl j’ this duplicated the base layer.
Then I clicked on the normal in the layers box and changed it to screen:
The icon now looks brighter
I merged the layers again.
The icon looks a little blurry, so I went to filters -> sharpen ->
And there we have it:
Now when you save an icon there are three types people usually save it as jpg, gif and png. I would advise png, as it preserves the quality the best. I hope this helps people!
This tutorial will cover:
• cropping
• blending
• screen layers
• sharpening
I opened the first picture:
cropped the first picture. I used the cropping tool, and in the tool bar selected the dimensions 100 by 100. This gives the correct dimensions for when you resize the picture for the icon:
I then dragged the cropping tool over the picture, to crop the part of the picture I wanted for the icon and clicked the tick box to crop it:
go to image, image size and check the size of the picture, the picture is 352 pixels. Now open your second picture, check its height. It is higher than the other picture so resized it so they were the same height 352 pixels. This helps keep the body and face sizes in relative proportion to each other.
On your second picture hit ‘ctrl a’ this will select the entire picture.
Then hit ‘ctrl c’ and this will copy the picture
Return to your first picture and hit ‘ctrl v’ this will paste the second picture on top of the first picture in a new layer.
Use the move button and position the layer where you want the second picture to be on the icon
I placed the picture to the right hand side so as not to obscure the other persons face:
Then I used the magic wand button:
I clicked it over the background around the person in layer two and hit ‘ctrl x’ to remove the background:
This fortunately took the background away. If there was any part of the background left, I would use the eraser tool to take the other parts away
Then I right clicked on top later, and selected merge visible:
Its time to resize the blended picture to icon size!
Go to image, image size and put in 100 by 100 pixels, hit okay:
As you can see the colours to the two people are very different. I merge the layers so I could do the following. Go to image -> adjustment -> auto colour. Then image -> adjustment -> auto contrast and image -> adjustment -> auto levels:
Now the picture’s colour is a little better.
The icon is a little dark so I hit ‘ctrl j’ this duplicated the base layer.
Then I clicked on the normal in the layers box and changed it to screen:
The icon now looks brighter
I merged the layers again.
The icon looks a little blurry, so I went to filters -> sharpen ->
And there we have it:
Now when you save an icon there are three types people usually save it as jpg, gif and png. I would advise png, as it preserves the quality the best. I hope this helps people!