Combine, auto composite your own photos with Generative Fill ai in Adobe Photoshop

Colin Smith

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Combine images with Generative Fill in Photoshop

I have 2 examples here of ways to combine images with Generative Fill. This is just a taste of what you can do with your own photos. All the photos used in this tutorial are my own. And they said photography of dead? Far from it. Long Live Photography.

Lets start with a shot I got of the Moana Surfrider hotel in Waiki Beach, Hawaii (you can see my room from here). Just for fun, we will drop it in as a mountainside villa on diamond Head Crater.

Aerial drone photo of the Moana Surfrider hotel and Waikiki Beach with high-rises behind

Open Both images in Photoshop File>Open

To combine, choose the Move tool (V key).

Drag the first image up into the tab of the second image.

Dragging the hotel photo up to the tab of the Diamond Head image, shown with a yellow arrow

Move your cursoe into the 2nd image and release. You will now see 2 layers in a single document. (The short video above shows this clearly).

Layers panel with the hotel on Layer 1 above the Diamond Head Background

Let’s resize the top layer

Press Ctrl+T (Win) Cmd+T (Mac). From now on I will write it Ctrl/Cmd+T etc.

This gives us Free transform and 8 adjustment handles.

Hotel photo with Free Transform handles circled, labeled Ctrl/Cmd+T

Hold down Alt/Option and drag one of the corners to the center. Notice because the Alt/Option is held down, it transforms from the center.

Size the image to suit your tastes. Not to real scale, but if you don’t know what Diamond Head looks like in real life, you wouldn’t know the actual size anyway.

The hotel photo scaled and placed over the Diamond Head crater ridge

Now we need to make a special type of selection for this to work. Let’s start by selecting the building.

Grab the Quick Selection tool. (Or whatever selection tool you prefer).

Selection tools menu with Object Selection, Quick Selection and Magic Wand

Paint over the image to select the building. Tip: if your selection goes too far, hold down alt/Option and drag to remove from selection.

Marching ants around the hotel building after painting with Quick Selection

Now we want to create a selection where we are selecting outside the building, but constrained to a rectangle, as shown in Green.

Area around the hotel shown in green, the selection to be filled outside the building

Press Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+I to inverse the selection. Or use Select>Inverse.

Notice the marching ants around the edges of the image. We are now selecting everything BUT the building.

Marching ants around the edges of the canvas, everything selected except the building

Lets trim the selection

Grab the Rectangle Marquee tool.

Hold down Alt/Option and drag over the top part to remove it from the selection, Notice I left a little overlap. The overlap is important.

Now do the same on the sides and bottom.

Rectangular marquee subtracting the outer areas around the hotel photo

Now we have selected a box around the rectangle of the top image. But the Building isn’t selected.

Selection box around the hotel photo with the building excluded

If I quickly paint with red, you can easily visualize which areas are selected.

Undo the red (obviously)

Red overlay showing the area around the hotel that Generative Fill will replace

Let’s blend them together.

Click on Generate (Currently only in the Beta version of Photoshop – How to get it here)

Generative Fill button in the Contextual Task Bar

Leve the text filed blank and click Generate.

Generate button in the Generative Fill prompt bar with the prompt left blank

And you can see it merged the building into the side of the cliff. Sure, it’s not perfect, but this is where your Photoshop skills come int play, to retouch it. (See, your skills aren’t obsolete anymore than your camera is).

The hotel merged into the Diamond Head cliff side by Generative Fill

Just for fun, I added a water fall, you can see it on the short video at the top.

The hotel on the crater ridge with a generated waterfall cascading down the cliff

Fusing 2 images together in Photoshop

Let’s look at another completely different example, for a completely different result.

Here I have 2 photos I shot with my drone. One of a beach and the second of a forest from above.

Drone shot looking straight down at waves washing onto a sandy beach

Just like we did with the first example, combine the 2 photos into a single document.

Drone shot looking straight down on a dense green forest canopy

Choose the move tool (V).

Zoom out, so you can see the canvas. (Alt/Option and scroll wheel, or zoom tool).

Drag the top layer down and off the canvas, leaving a gap between the placement of the 2 layers as shown by the red box. Tip: Hold down the Shift key as you drag to constrain the alignment.

Beach layer moved up with an empty gap left below it, outlined in red

Now, you might think I’m going for the crop tool to revel the 2 layers. Nope.

Choose Image>Reveal All (I know you’re here for all the tips)

Image menu with Reveal All highlighted

As you can see, Photoshop resizes the document to show all the pixels.

Now to fix the gap.

Beach above and forest below with a white gap between them

Grab the rectangular Marquee tool (M)

Drag over the area to fuse together. Make sure to include lots of overlap.

Rectangular marquee covering the gap with plenty of overlap into both photos

Click Generative fill, than Generate, like we have earlier in this tutorial.

Generative Fill button in the Contextual Task Bar

Generate button highlighted in the Generative Fill prompt bar

And here is our final masterpiece. Pretty cool right?

Beach and forest fused seamlessly into one aerial image by Generative Fill

I hope you found this useful.

If you did, it’s a taste of what’s on my new course on Generative Fill in Photoshop, Check it out here.

Generative Fill in Photoshop course banner by Colin Smith

Also follow me on Instagram, Tik Tik and Twitter.  for shorts and reels.

Great to see you here at the CAFE

Happy Photoshopping

Colin


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