Thanks. I tried merging by a dotty mask, which works kind of the same (I don't want the skin under the drops to not exist at all, so I think the opacity trick won't work here, unless perhaps only used on the drops... though I think I tried that, mmm). The problem is that I don't want skinpores' bump in my drops, and it's hard to match the bump/offset. You easily get a tiny ridge around the drop. I have experimented earlier with a surface layer (after the default) masked by dots and set to smooth (all bump out), and add tiny drop-bump and reflection there, but that gives the same difficulty. I may have another go... must be a way....