Well ill wirte a VERY mini-guide on it now.
Blending in photoshop cs2/cs3.
First what is blending? Blending is an "effect" used to merge the background and render so that it dose not look as though its pasted on. To get this effect we can do many things but I will show the most common and easy ways of doing this.
Stocks:
With stocks we have a background so that when we throw it on a layer its not cut. With stocks you have to passively blend it while your creating your sig/tag/banner/lp by overlapping effects onto it. Smudging is a great way to do this also c4ds work to cover some of the main image to blend it with the background.
Renders:
Renders can be blended at any point in time unlike stocks (as long as you don't apply image or flatten it). The best way of going about blending a render is to take a soft round brush about 20-30px and setting the opacity on the brush too about 10-15% and erasing around the outer area of the render. This should make it lighter and make it merge with the background.
Thats it. Have fun.
Sorry for spelling errors bad grammar and bad sentence structure but it should be easy enough to understand. Hope it helped.
This post was edited by Asilia on May 31 2008 01:59pm