Adobe PhotoShop: Merging two images. Help, please?

I should be able to do this. I used to be able to do this. And now I can’t remember how to do this!

I have two images -two maps of the same area. One is a basic street map of a town, one shows the location of conservation land in the same town. What I need to do is overlay the conservation map onto the street map. I have them in jpeg format and can convert as needed. I have tried several ways and am not getting the results I need. The whole layer/transparency thing is throwing me for a loop. I’ve gotten as far as making the Conservation map transparent and copying it onto the other map, but can’t resize it to match up. I’m sure there is an easy way, I’m just not seeing it!

Thanks in advance for any help. I’ll keep working on it in the meantime…

Just to be clear, I’m not experienced working with layers. I think I used to do this in a different program that was more intuitive in this respect. So if it’s layers I need, I’ll need you to type r e a l s l o w…
Thanks!

I don’t have Photoshop here. Given that… try resizing the files so that they have the same physical dimensions (not pixel dimensions). Photoshop should be smart enough to maintain that physical relationship when you cut and paste. Maybe.

I think I know what your trying to do. Open both pics in photoshop. Each one will have it’s own layer palette. Drag the layer from one of the pics onto the other and it will copy it over to the other picture as a separate layer. (Not sure if that’s clear or not, but try it’s somewhat intuitive when you do it). Anyways, now working with the picture that has two layers (you can close the other one), if they are sized correctly, you can just move them around until they are lined up, setting the transparancy slider lower should accomplish what I think your looking for. If the pics arn’t the same size you can use the transform function to adjust them. You’ll want to Control-Click the layer you want to resize and then hit Control-T to get into transform mode. When that happens grab onto one of the little resizer boxes at the corner and while and you can adjust the size of the pic, holding shift (or maybe control, don’t remember) will keep the aspect ratio the same. Sorry if this doesn’t make sense, it’s hard to explain it without going though the motions. If you want to email me the two pics, I can actually try doing it and then it’ll be easier to walk you through it.

Thnak you both. Joey P, I’ll take you up on that offer. I’ll email you the two images and it should be obvious what I’m trying to do. This is frustrating! I know what I want to do and can’t seem to do it!
Thanks, again.

I do this all the time …

You have to do this:

  1. put the overlay onto a second layer.
  2. set the transparency to 30-50%
  3. Pick a common point on both maps somewhere on the top left and align them.
  4. Pick a second common point on the bottom right somewhere and see if they align. If not, use the transform tool to scale* the overlay image until the bottom right points match. Viola.