You can create anything you can imagine by combining images into unique composites in Photoshop and the iPad is a great place to do that.
In this video we'll see how to make a technically simple but effective composite in Photoshop on your iPad, exploring how to use layers to work with separate elements in a composite.
I'll start by taking a look at the Layers panel and I can see right away that there's some content that's hidden from view.
That's the woman on the layer at the bottom of the layer stack.
So, I'm going to change the layer stacking order.
To do that I'll tap on the woman layer to select it and then I'll press and hold that layer and drag up above the next layer in the layer stack.
And the woman appears in the image.
Next, let's bring another element into this composite.
I'll go to the Toolbar and I'll tap the Place Image Tool.
And I'm going to tap Camera Roll.
In the Camera Roll I'll navigate to the photo that I want to bring in.
And when it appears in Photoshop on the iPad, I'm automatically in Transform mode.
So, I can press any of the corner anchor points and drag inward to resize the document proportionately.
I'll press inside the bounding box and drag to move it approximately where I want it and then I'll press the rotate handle which is hanging down from the bottom of the document and I'll rotate it and I'll tap Done.
The next thing I want to do is knock out the black background around the large dolphin that I just brought in.
In the Layers panel, I'll make sure that only the layer that I just brought in is selected and then I'll go to the Taskbar and tap Layer Properties.
And in the Layer Properties panel I'll tap the Blend Mode menu and I'll scroll down to the Screen Blend Mode and select that one.
The Screen Blend Mode knocks out the darker parts of the dolphin layer and leaves only the lighter parts.
I'll close Layer Properties.
Now with the Move Tool selected I'll press and drag to move the dolphin exactly where I want him in the image.
As the number of layers in a document grows, it's a good idea to group your layers to organize them.
To do that you have to select multiple layers.
So, let's see how that's done.
I'll tap the top layer that I want to include in my layer group.
Then I'll go to the Taskbar and tap the three-dot menu there and I'll choose Begin multi-select mode.
That adds a checkbox to each of the layer thumbnails.
In detailed layer view that checkbox is to the left of the thumbnails.
Now I'll just tap the checkbox on each layer that I want to add to my layer group.
And to make the layer group I'll tap the Folder icon that appears in the Taskbar.
You can see that those three layers are now grouped together.
If I double tap them that opens the layer group and lets me see them. and then I can tap the back arrow to go back and see all my layers and this layer group.
So now that you know how to add images to a composite and how to work with them using layers and layer groups in Photoshop on your iPad try making some layered composites of your own, choose images that look like they'll go together in terms of content, lighting and color and use the layer techniques that you learned here to combine them.
