I'm totally new at this so I was trying a tutorial for blending in Photoshop because I couldn't find one for Photoplus. (http://www.dreamvision-entertainment.com/dvw/tutorials/blendtut.html) It was very similar enough until I got to step 6. My problem is that the two images are just one on top of the other instead of blending together like in the tutorial's picture. Is this just a difference in Photoshop and Photoplus? Or did i mess up the gradients somehow? Please help!

Layer masks in Photoshop are just different than masks in Photoplus, so I don't think that effect could be achieved in Photoplus with a Photoshop tutorial.

The GIMP is a freeware graphics program that is good at blending. You might want to give that a try.

http://www.gimp.org/

try PHOTOshop