Adding Pixel Layers & Transforming

[Alan9940]

I've been playing around with challenging images where I want to switch out a sky. Nearly every image I've messed up, so far, has been a desert scene--so lots of blue sky, mountains, and green stuff. I've been creating levels adjusted masks from the blue channel which is great. However, when I add a new sky image (copy/paste), which is about twice the size of my original image, the original "transforms" to a much smaller size into the upper left area and I cannot "transform" the sky image to make it fit into the original properly.

The only way I found to keep the document from resizing itself is to scale the sky image to the same size as the original before copying and pasting into the original. However, when I click on the Layer Tool to move the sky up into the desired position it goes beyond the upper boundary of the original. Huh? Every other photo editor I've used--PS and Affinity Photo, for a couple of examples--when I make this same move the sky image "crops" itself to the original image's top boundary.

To do all this in PS, I'd:

1. Open the original image and generate a mask for the new sky.
2. Open a sky image, copy it, then paste as a new layer into the original.
3. Drag the sky layer below #1.
4. Ctrl/T (transform) and move sky into desired position.
5. Done!

Is there an equivalent easy number of steps to do this same thing in PL?

Thank you for any insight provided.

-Alan

[bkh]

If you open a picture in PL, PL is in picture mode. This means that the background image determines the document size and cannot be transformed. This is what happens when you make the sky the background image.

There are two possible workarounds:

• keep a copy of the original image as the background image
• switch to document mode in the document attributes panel.

There is a section about picture vs. document mode in the manual which may be worth looking at.

Cheers,

Burkhard

[Alan9940]

Hi Burkhard,

I always forget about those different modes! Duplicating the background layer, copy/paste of the larger sky image into the document, then dragging the sky layer below the duplicate background layer fixed my issue of the entire document resizing itself, and provided the handles necessary to transform the layer via the Layer Tool.

However, to avoid any distortion of the sky image I can only transform it to about the same size as the original image. Fine. Now I want to simply move the sky vertically into the desired position (based mainly on the cloud patterns.) However, when I move the sky vertically it moves beyond the upper boundary of the original appearing as a translucent area. What am I missing to keep this from happening? Every other photo editor I've used to do this same thing crops the sky at the upper image boundary. Do I have to crop back to the original to remove this unwanted area? Or is it not really there? In other words, that area wouldn't appear in an exported TIFF file?

Thanks, again, for your help.

-Alan

[Alan9940]

I was playing around a bit more and I think I've answered my own question.

If I flatten the layers or create a merged layer on top of the layer stack, the translucent area of the sky above the actual image disappears. That certainly works, but if you have any other input I'd love to hear it.

Thanks!

[Hoogo]

I'm used to these translucent areas. They are useful during your work, and they are gone when you export your final Jpg or flatten the picture.

Translucent.jpg

[Martin Huber]

(...)
Do I have to crop back to the original to remove this unwanted area? Or is it not really there? In other words, that area wouldn't appear in an exported TIFF file?

No, you don't have to crop anything manually. If you export to a format like TIFF or JPEG, PhotoLine just exports the content inside the document borders/size.

If I flatten the layers or create a merged layer on top of the layer stack, the translucent area of the sky above the actual image disappears. That certainly works, but if you have any other input I'd love to hear it.

If you don't want to see the layer parts exceeding the document size, you can hide them using "View > Hide Border Content".

Martin

[Alan9940]

@Hoogo Actually, after playing around a bit more, yesterday, I started to find that I appreciated seeing that translucent image area outside the main borders because I might make additional compositional decisions based on that area.

@Martin Huber Thanks, Martin. I will keep that command in mind should I decide I don't want to see that area.