Blending Photo

What I did here was I opened the picture of the girl blowing on the dandelion into its own page and then loaded the rest of the pictures onto that one. After resizing them to the appropriate size, I turned off the layer holding the grass picture. I then added a layer mask to the dandelions picture, selected the gradient tool, and chose a linear, foreground-into-background style of gradient fade. Using the gradient tool, I clicked and dragged a short distance from the dandelion on the left to a space near it, all while holding shift, in order to bring about the gradient effect into the girl picture and the dandelion picture. After doing so, I turned on the spring background picture layer and did the same thing I did with the other two pictures, except I clicked and dragged my cursor vertically instead of horizontally two fade it into the other two pictures. In the process of all this, I learned something really useful, being that if you want to add another gradient fade somewhere else on the picture without getting rid of an existing one, you have to change the gradient style from foreground-to-background to a foreground-to-transparent kind of style. Doing so allows one two put in as many other gradient fades as they wish because instead of the layer mask going from white to black, black being the part that's already shaded, the fade will go from a white color to no color at all, allowing whatever we don't want covered  to not be at all.

Gold Text Effect

What I did here was I first made a new 640 pixel x 480 pixel document and filled the background layer with black. I then typed in "Gold" in a white color in Times New Roman and had to resize the word to the appropriate dimensions. After doing so, I duplicated the text layer and added a gradient overlay onto the duplicated text copy. I then went into the gradient color option box and chose a lighter to darker gradient fade for the text. After changing the gradient style to "Reflected", I went into the bevel and emboss option box to change the technique to "Chisel Hard", the gloss contour to "Ring Double", changed the structure size to make the "open" areas of the effect go away, and finally the depth to enhance the lighting effect. After that, I checked the "Contour" option and added an "Inner Glow", changing the blend mode to multiply, lowering the opacity to 50%, selecting an orange color for the glow, and finally increasing the glow size to 15 pixels. With that being done, a stroke was added to the outside of the word. I changed the structure size to 5 pixels, the fill type to gradient, and changed the style to "Reflected" so I could finally add the same color I used on the text to the stroke. After, again, adding the bevel and emboss option to the stroke, this time with the style being changed to "Stroke Emboss", the technique to "Chisel Hard", the size to 5 pixels, and the gloss contour to "Ring Double", and checking the Contour option below the words "Bevel and Emboss", I applied an outer glow to the effect, complete with the opacity at 50%, the color to an orange color, and the size to 29 pixels.For the last and final step, I made a new blank layer over the text copy layer and loaded up the assorted brushes. I eye-dropped a light gold color from the text after replacing the current brushes and, by choosing a "Crosshatch" brush to use as a sparkle, I mixed a few sparkles here and there to make the text almost shine, but at the same time, lowering the opacity to how I think looked the best and thus, the final product was born.