Hi People
I am new to P-P X6, and am trying to combine two images. the main image is a standard photo, which i want to overlay with a photo i have of smoke taken against a black background, with the end result being just the smoke overlaid on the original photo- how do I do this?
Any assist would be great!
If you had something more substantial, like a flag on a flagpole, I would suggest using photopaint's cutout lab to remove the background. Then you would be able to place it in front of your photo.
Smoke sounds much more difficult to me. It does not have clearly defined edges, so I think the cutout lab will struggle at finding any edges to cut out. But maybe try it (and try using the cutout lab on something more solid first, if you're not already familiar with it). You might be able to apply feathering to the cutout but I think it is going to take some extra work.
Thanks for the advice- got me out of a bit of a hole, and got me thinking properly
Smoke is a little different to work with as Harry noted. Smoke isn't a solid object, it has varying degrees of transparency. So that's how you work the image.
I don't have X6, but this is how I created my quick and dirty example in X5.
Start work in Draw, because it has more transparency options (in X5 anyway). Import the two images and put the smoke image on top. Apply transparency to it, and change the transparency mode. My smoke had a white background, so I used subtract mode. This made the white background disappear, and just left the smoke, with the dragon visible through it. Check where it crosses the body. You can adjust the appearance of the smoke till you're happy with it.
Select all the objects and "convert to bitmap." This will combine them. Then choose "edit bitmap" and it will open in PhotoPaint as one image. You can edit further from there.
Like I said, X6 may have more native transparency options in PP, but starting in Draw works for the rest of us.
Wit the smoke layer on top, you could try changing the blend mode to Screen which will drop out the dark areas.