blending

1. Blending is very useful especially if you're too lazy to crop. However, I personally do still prefer a combination of cropping and blending where I crop certain parts while blending other parts. Below are some of my past works where I did blending.

2. I've seen many new graphic designers lower the opacity of the photos they use every time they crop/blend. I would say that it is not a must to do this and even if you do, please please make sure nothing is on the character's face. Because if you lower the opacity of your character and you happen to have an airplane in the background behind his photo, he's going to have a plane in his face.

To solve this problem, you can:
a) increase the opacity of your character's photo while earasing/blending the other parts of his body slightly so that the opacity of those places drop while his face still remains clear
b) erase or cover up the plane or any other disturbance in the background

3. To start blending, add the photos you need in different layers. In my case below, I've added 2 photos of my 'characters' and a photo of a sky as the background for now. I chose this sky photo as my background mostly because of it's redness, it would fit my choice of photos for my characters better.

4. First, I'll add the layer masks for the layers so t