From the course: Photoshop 2022 Essential Training

Blend Mode basics - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2022 Essential Training

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Blend Mode basics

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- [Instructor] In this video we're going to take a look at how to use blend modes to control how layers interact with one another. But keep in mind blend modes aren't limited to Layers, they can be used with many other painting tools and when adding layer effects like Drop Shadows and more. So in this document I have two layers, we have the image of the silo, which I'm going to call the base color. And it could be made up of several layers, but in this case it's just a single layer. And we have the wheat layer which is the blend color, and it's going to give us the result that we see on screen. Down here at the bottom we've got three color swatches because some of these blend modes actually hide specific colors. All right, the blend modes are grouped together in the list and they're separated by these thin lines right here. Now let's start by taking a look at the first group, we have normal and dissolve. So in normal there really isn't any blending. We can change the opacity of the layer but it's not technically a blend mode. Now with dissolve, there's no visible difference at 100%. But if I decrease the opacity of the layer, Photoshop starts blending the two layers together. Now technically, dissolve isn't really blending it's just picking one pixel from one layer or the other layer randomly. So it creates this speckled effect where the resulting color is either a color from the base layer or from the blend layer, but it's never a combination of the two. All right, let's increase the opacity back to 100 and take a look at this second group. So the second group of blend modes all have a stronger effect as the blend color becomes darker. So as we preview all of the effects we can see that they do in fact, all get darker. And for all the blend modes in this group, the pixels that are white they're hidden, they just disappear. And Multiply is the most common blend mode in this group and it just multiplies the base color with the blend color. All right, the third group of blend modes all have stronger effects as the blend color becomes lighter. They're basically the inverse of the previous group of blend modes. So as we preview them we can see that in fact, they do all get lighter. And for all of the blend modes in this group, pixels that are black are just hidden, they just disappear. The most common is probably Screen, it's like Multiply, except that it's multiplying the inverse of the blend and the base color. All right, this fourth group of blend modes, they all add contrast to an image because they lighten colors that are brighter than 50% gray, and they darken colors that are darker than 50% gray. And Overlay and Soft Light are probably the two most commonly used blend modes in this group. So we can see as I move through them for all of the blend modes in this group, pixels that are 50% gray will disappear. All right, because the Overlay blend mode actually multiplies the colors that are darker than 50% and screens the colors that are lighter than 50%. There's potential to add a lot of contrast, whereas the Soft Light blend mode, isn't going to add as much contrast because it uses a gamma adjustment to just darken or lighten the values. Both of these blend modes, the Overlay as well as the Soft Light, are commonly used to apply textures when compositing images together in order to help blend edges and also unify images with different amounts of texture or noise and color. All right, the fifth group of blend modes. The Difference, and Exclusion, and Subtract, and Divide. Well they all have scientific as well as creative applications, but they're really not used as often. The sixth group of blend modes blend the Hue, Saturation, Color and Luminosity. So Hue keeps the hue of the blend layer. So in this case, it would be the orange of the wheat. The Saturation keeps the saturation from the wheat layer, but not the hue or the color. And the Color preserves the gray levels from the base layer, but it keeps the hue and saturation of the leaf layer. It's actually really useful for achieving a hand color or tinted effect. And finally, the Luminosity is the inverse of the color mode. So only the luminance values are affected, and this blend mode can really help to suppress color shifts when making large adjustments using the levels and curves adjustment layers. All right, each of the blend modes has the live preview when we roll over the blend mode, but you can also cycle through them using a keyboard shortcut, as long as you have the Move Tools selected or any tool that doesn't have a blend mode option for the tool in the Options bar, hold down the Shift key and use the plus key to go down through the different blend modes, or use the minus key to come back up through the different blend modes. Now before we wrap up, I want to take a look at two additional examples that you can find in the exercise files. The first one shows the different blend modes, using two black and white gradients which I find helpful to pre-visualize the effects of the blend modes. The second example shows the different blend modes with the color images that we were just looking at and over on the right for both of these files, if you just want to focus in on the most popular blend modes, you can toggle on this layer group. Excellent, next we'll take a look at more specific uses for the most popular blend modes.

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