Layer Masks

Hi guyz, Heres my story. I am tryin to learn maskin an blendin images together.After I load an image on to the work area for some reason the "add layer mask" button is always greyed out. I have read that it could be because my image is set to background. Unfortunately all the tut's that I read are for PS5 or 5.5 an I have PS7. Sometimes they say to go to places in the toolbar that I don have because its located someplace diff now.I have worked w/animatins an filters a little bit but this drivin me nuts! Could somebody please tell me what I'm missin here? :(

Thanks,

Jan

Btw - I only used the "I am Jan" name because somebody else was already usin my name. ;)

hey ya might wanna have a look at my little tut on the matter
http://www.heathrowe.com/tuts/blending.asp

excuse the subjet images - its the process thats important here
hope this helps
heathrowe

Thanks for the reply Heathrow. Unfortunately I jus can't seem to communicate very well.

I can not get past the beginning of the tut because after I load the images the "add layer mask" button is greyed out.

There is nothin wrong w/the tutorials.The tutorials jus do not address this problem. :p

If you load an image, and you only see the default layer, that is the background layer. You cant do anything to it. So what you need to do is click and drag the layer to the 'make new layer' icon (or right click and duplicate it.)
That makes a copy that you can edit. If you like you can now delete the original background layer and you just have the one layer that is editable.

Thanks Marble, I did that.Dragged the layer down to the 'make new layer' icon in the layers pallette. An then I right click deleted the original of each of the 4 pics (layers).

Then I placed these layers on top of a transparent layer big enough to hold all of them in the work space.

Should I have cropped an moved these pics from the layers that they are on, in the "work space" to the new transparant layer?

Does it make any diff if I have the transparant layer set to "bitmap, greyscale, rgb color, cmyk color or lab color when I create the "new transparent layer" to place the pics on in the "work area"?

Too many "quotes" for me to understand. If you have four pictures that you want to blend together somehow, and you've gotten them all into a single .psd file, then you're fine. Do that, and it shouldn't matter if you have a transparent background image or not. And you can always crop your image, so make the cavas size bigger than all of the pictures to allow for flexibility. Then when you're done (or halfway through) you can crop it down to size. Hope this helps.

tom

Thanks Tom! Is this the same TRHaynes w/Perfect Disk?

No the 4 pics are seperate.How would I get them onto one psd?

I jus did a re-install lately an it jus seems like the tools an commands are screwy.I don know.Bugs the crap outta me.I used to be able to crop an move.

Really frustrating.

Thanks for the reply.

I jus tried openin a transparent background an then the images.I used the marquee tool an then the move tool to place the images onto the transparent background.Am I on the right track? Will this be a step in the right direction to "blend" images next to one another or into each other?

You want four images on one transparent background, am I correct? If in fact that is what you are trying to do you could just open a new image set to transparent background, then copy and paste all four images onto your canvas. Using a new layer for each image, which it should do automatically. Then you can move them around to where you want them. Hope that is what you were talking about.