From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Applying blend modes to multiple layers and groups - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Applying blend modes to multiple layers and groups

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- [Instructor] There's an important difference between applying blend modes to individual layers versus applying blend modes to layer groups. We're going to take a look at this document where I have four copies of the exact same layer group. So within this group there is a bowling ball, a large pin, and a small pin. And then back here at the very bottom, I have the four different circles. All right, so in this first group, I'm just going to leave it alone and we're going to move to the second group so we have something to compare it to. Here I'm going to select all of the layers within the group, and I'm going to change their blend mode to Multiply, so we can see that each layer is multiplied with the other layers below them, as well as the circle. So we get this overlapping effect. I'm going to move to the next group, and instead of setting the individual layers to multiply, we'll set the group to Multiply. When we do this, it's as if Photoshop is merging all of the layers that are within that group before it's multiplying it with the layers below, in this case, that background circle, so we don't get the overlapping of the layers within the group itself. And finally, with this last group, I'm going to select all of the layers like we did before, and set their blend mode to Multiply. But then I'm going to target the layer group, and by default, the layer group is set to pass through. So whatever blend modes I assign within the group are going to pass through to any layers below them. So all I need to do is change this to the normal blend mode. Now all of the layers within the group are going to be multiplied together, so we get the same overlap, but those blend modes can't pass through to the circle below. So as you can see, there are a variety of different ways to blend layers together in Photoshop, depending on the effect that you're after.

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