Overlay Montage Action

Another action that I have been working on a for a while is an Overlay montage action. I love a well done overlay, but I have difficulty myself determining which pairs of images will really compliment each other.  Over the last year I have found myself very attracted to shots of pure texture, and I’ve been working at merging those with appropriate images to produce nice overlays.  I’ve developed an action that creates the overlays by prompting you to open a second image, and then overlaying the two images.

Here is an original image, just some nice Babies Breath in front of a Rose:

 

 

Here is the texture image, a close up of a canon from the Yorktown Battlefield:

 

 

Here is the resulting overlay montage:

 

 

To run this action you do the following:

1. Open the subject image.
2. Run the action.
3. You will be prompted to open the overlay image.
4. Press Continue and an Open dialog will be displayed.
5. Select the texture image and press Open.
6. Use the Levels layers to adjust the relative brightness of each of the images, and the overall brightness of the image.

There is a “Stop” function at the end that displays a dialog with my website and blog address.  You can disable this by opening the action clicking on the check mark next to the Stop step.

 

 

For that matter, you can turn off the Stop function between images too if it is slowing you down.