Hi Jao.
thanks for the link but that shows exactly what i described my action to be in my first message....barring a few mis described words.
however i will use this video as a reference....the point were the guy shows how much detailing is in the different masks...well i have no detail in any of the masks except the last layers mask which shows as full white
i have inserted a screen shot to show the results of what i am trying to blend...merge...stack, as you can see from the layers panel.....this isn't the result I'm hoping to get. this end result is the same no matter what i try to merge...blend...stack. as you could imagine, I'm getting quite stressed about this, if you could shed some light that would be great.