Photoshop® Elements 8 After the Shoot

Chapter 11. Combining Multiple Photos

Most of the tools and techniques you've learned about in this book so far have been used with single photos. Sometimes, though, one photo doesn't have all the information needed to create the desired image. That's when you need to work with a group of photos, combining the best parts of each into the perfect photo. Photoshop Elements (PSE) provides several intuitive and useful methods for combining images. After working through this chapter, you may never shoot a single photo of an important scene again.

Manually Combining Photos

One of the great things about working with digital photos is you can mix and match elements of different photos to create the perfect composition. There are a variety of reasons you might do this, from fixing someone's expression to creating completely new compositions.

Photoshop Elements 8 has some really cool automated tools that help you combine photos. However, before you begin using the automated tools, it's important to understand how to manually combine photos in case one of the automated features doesn't fit a specific project that you're working on.

Using a selection to copy and paste

One of the most common methods for moving content from one photo into another photo is to create a selection around the content, copy the content, and then paste it into a second photo. This is a relatively straightforward procedure that takes only a few minutes. In the following exercise, you learn how to combine parts of two photos ...