2 pictures combined - erasing a portion

[deboraheb]

Hello,

I've been using paint.net for awhile. Until recently I was able to use two pictures together and then erase a part of the top photo to see the underlying photo.

For example:

I have two pictures of socks that I want to put into one picture, but I want to move them close together, which means a portion of one of the photos will go on top of the other, not allowing the bottom photo to show.

 

Before what I did:

I open my first picture and expand the canvas

I copy and paste my second picture onto the canvas and move it so that the images of the socks look next to each other.  Doing this makes some of the first picture covered by the second picture.

I used to use the erase tool to remove the area of the second picture that is on top, so I can now see the bottom picture. And in the end it looks like the two pictures are together.

 

When I do this now, the erase tool only removes the area of the top picture, without showing the bottom image. 

 

I hope this makes sense.

Any ideas how I can get this to work again?

Thanks!

[Pixey]

Hello @deboraheb and welcome to the forum

 

I think this tutorial will be of help to you:

 

 

 

[deboraheb]

Thank you!  I appreciate the help, but it's not giving me what I'm hoping for (or I'm not doing it right).  Do you have any other tutorials for this?  Also, it used to work the way I described. Do you know if that functionality was removed with recent updates?  It was so easy to do.

[BoltBait]

2 minutes ago, deboraheb said:

Do you know if that functionality was removed with recent updates?

 

Make sure you're actually using 2 layers instead of only 1.

[deboraheb]

Thanks!  I see I can do that if I put them into 2 layers, so I appreciate it.  But before I didn't have to use two layers.  I could just copy and paste the second picture into the first picture and then I could erase.  It seems that I can't do that anymore.

[Ishi]

Yes, you have to have two layers so that the upper object does not erase the portion of lower object that comes into contact.

 

Are you not confusing Paint.NET perhaps with another program? It is possible to a certain degree with MS Paint to overlap objects when transparent selection is enabled or in Inkscape that several objects in one layer could overlap one another with ruining them or in MS Publisher where several photo could overlap just fine in one page.

[deboraheb]

Thanks.  Definitely paint.net as that's the only one I have ever used (I've never used and don't have MS Paint).  The way I described is the only way I had ever created this type of photo, and I've used this method several hundred times.  It looks like I'll have to revise my method. Thank you for your help! I appreciate that you took the time.

[MJW]

10 hours ago, deboraheb said:

I could just copy and paste the second picture into the first picture and then I could erase.

 

I think you must be misremembering.  That was never possible, and it wouldn't make sense for it to work that way. If you paste into a layer, rather than into a new layer, the pixels in the layer get replaced by the pasted pixels. There's no way now, and there never was a way, that erasing the new pixels  would restore the old pixels. Did you perhaps first duplicate the layer you pasted into? That would work the way you described, since the pixels in the lower (original) layer would show through the erased area in the duplicate layer that was pasted into.

[deboraheb]

Thanks for the response.  I don't think I'm misremembering since I've done it this way hundreds of times. But after all of these responses, maybe I am!

Thanks!