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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