How To Use Advanced Blending Options In Photoshop For Intricate Designs – Most artists know that layers are one of the most popular, even ugly, things in Photoshop. Layers are the foundation of non-destructive editing in Photoshop, and almost all Photoshop workflows include multiple layers. Therefore, it is important to understand how these components are combined with Photoshop techniques.
This article gives you the basic knowledge of mixing and takes you through the most effective mixing techniques. If you’re new to Photoshop, read my Adobe Photoshop Beginner’s Guide before you get started.
How To Use Advanced Blending Options In Photoshop For Intricate Designs
In Photoshop, there are colorblind options under the “Layers” tab. Defines how a given layer is related to the layer below it. Check out the image below:
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As you can see in the image above, Photoshop has 6 skin types in 27 groups that already give you an idea of what they do. Although there are 27 in total, most of us will find only a few useful in most situations. There are some combinations that I have never used or seen anyone use, and this article covers more than a dozen of the combinations that I find most useful.
Before we get into the opacity options, you need to understand the other two tools in the Layers panel in Photoshop: opacity and fill. Check out the image below:
I stacked three copies of the same photo on top. The opacity of each layer can be adjusted using the Opacity drop-down menu (in red in the image above).
The difference between the three versions is clear. The center is 100% opaque, in other words, it blocks out everything in the layers below. The image on the left has an opacity of 50%, which means it is transparent. It shows that both the selected layer and the layer below it overlap. Compare left and right. The 20% Opacity layer shows 80% background and 20% selection layer.
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Opacity is often used in painting to reduce the effect of a particular area. The above explains how light works in theory. Now let’s show you how to use it in practice. Check out the image below:
As you can see, I used a simple curve adjustment method to increase the contrast. But you will notice that the results are gone. Sometimes it is difficult to connect correctly with the connection tool itself. The opacity slider comes to the rescue in such situations. What I need to do to reduce the intensity of this adjustment is to lower the Curves layer. The image below is the result when I lowered the ship’s brightness to 42%.
For a long time, I was one of those people who didn’t realize the difference between opacity and saturation (another way of lowering opacity, under opacity). I have often seen that the Opacity and Fill outputs produce the same result. If both the cover and the fill do the same thing, what’s the point of having two options? It was a question that had bothered me for some time. I didn’t notice the difference until I got used to Photoshop’s “Special Blind Modes”.
Earlier in this article we saw that there are 27 types of combinations in Photoshop. Among them, Photoshop has 8 skin types that are unique: Color Burn, Linear Burn, Color Dodge, Linear Dodge, Vivid Light, Linear Light, Hard Mix and Contrast. These are just eight ways opacity and saturation differ. Otherwise they all give the same result.
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Let me explain the above with an example so that you can better understand the difference between the two. Check out the original photo below:
Let’s say I want to add an orange color to the mountains and grass. To do this, I can add a layer above the image that is completely orange (255, 163, 63 to be precise). I can choose Color Burn as the blending mode. You can see the result below:
It looks scary, doesn’t it? To guide you, I would like to lower the brightness to 25% as shown below:
The photo looks better, but has more sepia than the warm tone I have. In the image below, I lowered the Fill to 25% instead of the Opacity:
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The above seems obvious. The difference between opacity and filling is clearly visible. These two methods produce light in different ways.
In particular, lowering the brightness reduces the visibility of the layer in the entire image. Fill, on the other hand, affects different parts of the image differently. Honestly, it all depends on the “effect” of the skin color you choose – for example, whether the color temperature makes the image darker in the shadows than in the highlights. Lowering the Fill reduces the initial effect. It was already weak, while the strong effects took more time to wear off. This is why the 25% filled image above has a darker, warmer tone than the 25% filled image. In other words, Color Burn affects the shadows more so that the warm look of the shadows is extended while the saturation is reduced.
Although Photoshop offers 27 skin types, most of us don’t use them all. There are even other production methods that I wonder if anyone would use. Let me take you to the most useful ones. I start with the easy ones and move on to the more difficult ones.
For obvious reasons, Normal is the default mode. Photoshop automatically places the selected layer on top of the layer below it, and the transparency and/or fill determines how it looks.
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The image above shows a simple layering of curves to increase the contrast of an image. In fact, you can also see that the color has faded and the color has faded. These types of adjustments are common in curve correction, but are not always what you want.
The Clarity blend mode is the solution to this problem. It’s under Blend Mode in the drop-down menu and is a member of the Properties group. As such, it only changes the selected brightness settings, leaving everything else unchanged. In other words, it only brightens or darkens the pixels and does not change their saturation or color.
Take a look at the example below, where I used the same Curves adjustment, but set the Curves mode to Light Composition mode:
In some cases, using Luminosity in this way can make an image appear blurry as our eyes are used to seeing a little more brightness in contrast. The better the contrast you use, the lower it appears to be.
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Another useful feature of combining color properties is saturation. This combination method is useful for someone who wants to control saturation beyond the normal use of Photoshop’s saturation slider. Photoshop’s saturation slider isn’t always perfect, as it uses the amount of the entire image, sometimes the most saturated areas that were previously beautiful. While one solution to this problem is the Vibrance slider, which treats the low pixels first, the Saturation blending mode is another easy option.
The difference may seem subtle, but pay attention to the corners and edges of the image. They are greatly increased in density compared to the original (and there is no color change to red, as was the case with the mixed form).
In the image above you can see that I changed the shape of my curve (the one with the red one) to “lighten” the dark areas. I set the brightness in the text because, with the Saturation blend selected, the actual brightness of the pixels will not change. Only their saturation can change – and in this case it slightly increases the saturation of the shadows, leaving the highlights unchanged. This caused the dark edges of the image to gain saturation, while the rest did not.
In the same way that the brightness curve only uses pixel brightness, the saturation curve only affects saturation. It does not increase contrast or change color. That is the power of these ‘own’ integration methods.
Layers In Photoshop
Hue is a composite color property and changes the base color of a layer. Check out the image below:
The golden hour has spread the colors of green in the trees. They say I want the trees to be green instead of orange. Hue integration comes in handy in such situations.
In the example above, I added a solid layer with a yellow-green color on top of the original image and set it to the Tint blending mode. To please the trees, I cut everything down
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