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Blend Modes - Part 1

Blend Modes in Photoshop


Photoshop is an incredibly powerful piece of software, and it has so many settings and tools and options that it can seem almost impossible to learn them all. One of the most useful but least understood aspects of Photoshop is the various Blending Modes that can be applied to each of your layers, or to pixels that you paint with any of the brush tools. There are a huge number of different blend modes, so we’re only going focus on just a few today.

We’re going to look at the blending modes that are available when you’re editing a JPEG file. You’ll notice that many of them operate in pairs, one affecting the image to lighten it, and the other to darken it, and both working in similar ways.



Dissolve
First of the blend modes is Dissolve. Well, technically ‘Normal’ is first. Dissolve randomly chooses to display either the blend pixels or the base pixels. In effect, this creates a scattered noise pattern that could be useful for faking film grain, although there are other (and usually better) ways to create the same effect.

Darken

This one is fairly self-explanatory: it compares the base pixel’s color value with the blend pixel’s color value and displays whichever one is darker. The only slightly confusing part is that it does this separately for each color channel, which means that you might not get exactly the results you were expecting, due to the slightly counterintuitive way that RGB colors are blended.

Multiply

Like Darken, the Multiply blend mode works based on the numerical RGB color values of each pixel. Instead of just displaying the darker pixel, it multiplies the value of each base pixel by the corresponding blend pixel and displays the result. Since 255 is equivalent to white in each channel (the pure RGB values for pure white are 255,255,255), you’d think you’d get a lighter image – but in fact the opposite is true and the result is always darker, due to some mathematical quirk of how color space gamuts work. No, I don’t understand it either, but hey, it works consistently.

Color Burn

Color burn is a reference to a technique used in the days of physical darkrooms, with red-tinted lights and dangerous chemicals. ‘Burning’ parts of the image with additional time in the developer chemical bath increased the contrast and generally darkened the image. White pixels aren’t affected, but everything else is.

Linear Burn

Linear burn, like color burn, is a holdover from the darkroom days. Instead of increasing contrast between the base pixel and the blend pixel, it simply darkens the base pixel based on the value of the blend pixel. Also like color burn, blending white pixels will have no effect.

Lighten

Like Darken, Lighten is pretty self-explanatory. It compares the color values of each base pixel with that of the corresponding blend pixel, and displays whichever color is lighter. Also like Darken, it compares each color channel (R, G and B) separately.

Screen

The Screen blend mode is the pair of the Multiply blending mode, except it actually works the way you might expect. Technically, the inverse of the color value is multiplied, but either way, the result is that all your colors are lightened.

Color Dodge

Dodging is the darkroom opposite of burning. While burning darkens the non-white pixels of an image, dodging brightens the pixels that aren’t already pure black. It’s very similar to the ‘Dodge’ tool you may already be familiar with, and works by decreasing contrast in general.

Linear Dodge

Linear dodge is similar to color dodge, except that instead of decreasing contrast, it simply increases the brightness of the base pixels based on the color of the blend pixels.
 Try out these blend modes and have fun creating!


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