Blending edges of photos of PSE6

I am trying to make a collage using a picture as a background and by adding 2 other pictures in the corner of the picture background.?I would like the main portion of added pictures to be solid but I would like the edges of the 2 added photos to sort of blend or fade into the picture background.?So the edges of the added photos are not as hard and you can see a bit of the background picture in the edges of the 2 added photos.?I have searched and cannot seem to figure out how to do it.?Maybe I am searching for the wrong terms, I don't know.?The photomerge option does not work.?Or I can't figure out how to make it work.?Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.?Thanks!

Blending edges of photos of PSE6

You could use a clipping mask to do this natively or you could use an add-on to add layer masking function to Elements.

This tutorial?which uses an adjustment layer as the base of a clipping mask is using an older version of Elements but it is done the same way in current versions of Elements.

http://www.myjanee.com/tuts/elements/elemask.htm

Note: You can also use a blank layer in the place of the adjustment layer in the above tutorial. Paint on the blank layer to create the base of the clipping mask. Use Gaussian Blur to soften (feather) the edges.

If you prefer the add-on approach, there are several freeware tool sets that include a layer mask add-on.?Here is a link to one of them.

http://www.cavesofice.org/~grant/Challenge/Tools/Files.html

Blending edges of photos of PSE6

I'm not sure exactly what you want to do, but if you just want to avoid the cutout look when combining parts of different photos, select what you want to move from one photo, then go to Select%26gt;Feather and add a one or two pixel feather to soften the edge before moving it. The more feathering, the blurring.