“Blend If” In Photoshop: The Best Blending Tool Explained | PTH #4

hey everybody welcome back to another episode of the photoshop training hour i am your host jesus ramirez thank you so much for joining me today let me know in the chat how you're doing and where you're watching from i'm streaming from the beautiful san francisco bay area i'm currently in san ramon california today we're going to discuss the powerful blend feature in photoshop it's one of my favorite blending tools in photoshop and what i'm going to do is just go through the entire tool and show you how it works and hopefully show you a lot of tips and tricks that you don't know that will help you in your workflow so let me take a look at the chat and see if we have any comments or questions um feel free to leave any comment or question that you like in the chat and i'll get to it when i can but yeah it looks like just people saying hello so thank you so much for joining me today on the fourth episode of the photoshop training hour this show is sponsored by our good friends at msi so thank you so much msi for sponsoring this episode of the photoshop training hour a little later on i'm going to discuss the wonderful products that i use from msi including my laptop the monitor that i have here on my right and also the desktop where i'm streaming this uh stream from so it's going to be an awesome episode feel free to ask anything that you want thank you so much karthik from india jen how's it going john good to see you so thank you so much for joining me and why don't we jump right to into it i'm going to be looking at the chat just to make sure that there's no questions no comments there's a lot to cover today this is going to be a deep dive into blendiff so i hope that you enjoy it and again feel free to ask any questions that you like let's jump right into it i'm going to switch over into my monitor and you can see this graphic i'll double click on the hand tool to fit the image to screen and this is the graphic that we're going to work with i can see sam is saying hello from malaysia i love malaysia i've actually been to kale kuala lumpur i was there about two years ago presenting photoshop i was teaching a photoshop class out there and it was so amazing great food great people so shout outs to the people of kuala lumpur and malaysia awesome we have anderson from switzerland thank you so much for joining so this is the graphic that we're going to work with so first of all what is blend if blend if is a tool that will allow you to blend pixels from one layer with the pixels of another layer very simple and the controls that we're going to take a look at are going to determine how those pixels blend so we have in this first graphic three layers we have this gray background layer this linear gradient and this angle radiant going around in a circle on the layer on top i'm going to double click to the side of the layer to bring up the layer style window now two things number one i'm going to click on the fx icon and reset to default default list just so that you can see the same layer sources i have just so that the layer styles that i have reflect the ones that you probably have on screen but it really doesn't matter we're not going to work on on them but i just want to assure you that even though the list may be different it'll still work the same because we're going to work with the advanced blending feature i'm sorry with the blender feature with the blended feature here another way to get to this screen is by going into the effects icon and selecting blending options so you can use either or you can reset the list if you want you don't have to i just did it earlier so that you can see what i'm seeing but it doesn't matter we're going to work with the blend if feature here and there's two areas that you need to look at the this layer in the underlying layer we're going to look at the drop down a little later on but we're going to start with gray and i can see a lot of people saying hello we have um fash2314 from london dan from massachusetts actually um next week or not next week tonight i'm going to start um a three week road trip across the east coast of the us and i will hit up massachusetts i'm flying to north carolina tonight and i'm gonna make my way all the way up to vermont uh following the coast and then head west towards ohio going all the way to chicago come back down to saint louis and then loop around back to north carolina going through mississippi and georgia south carolina so it should be a really fun trip three weeks and i'm going to continue streaming the episodes of the photoshop training hour while on the road so hopefully i can find areas with good internet for that so next time you see me it will be me on the road going through all those different areas and if you live in those areas let me know some cool places to visit um but yeah so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to show you how this layer works so that this layer sliders control the layer that you had active when you opened up the layer style window we had the angle gradient active when we opened up this window so when i click and drag on this black point slider notice how the black point or the black pixels this start disappearing here see that see how they start disappearing so this is what this layer is controlling it's making the black pixels disappear with this black point slider with the white point slider you probably guessed that we can make the white pixels disappear until we get to the other side also you can you can see these numbers here 0 and 255. those are the rgb values we have 256 levels of gray including 0 so from 0 to 255 0 is black 255 is white and that's what these numbers represent so once we get to about 128 or so that's halfway in between so what this is saying is that anything that is zero which is black here on the gradient all the way to 50 gray here at 128 will become invisible all these pixels are invisible so this is why we have black going across and around to the other side and they become invisible so this is what these numbers represent also you'll notice that this is a sharp line that we're creating there if you want to create a smooth transition between invisible and visible pixels then you will be able to create a smooth transition so let me just say that again because i was kind of reading a comment and i couldn't read and talk at the same time we have a sharp line and if we want to create a smooth transition between visible and invisible pixels we have to use a keyboard shortcut for that on windows you can hold the alt key and click that is option on the mac and you can now see that we can split these points apart so now what we're doing is having the pixels that are zero all the way to 51 so black up to that shade of gray this dark shade of gray will be completely invisible then from 51 to 113 we're going to have a smooth transition to visible pixels so after 113 which is this shade of gray we'll make it 128 just so it's 50 gray so basically once we get to 128 50 gray right in the center then we'll have 100 opacity on those pixels so it's a great way of just creating those smooth transitions once again you can hold alt on windows option on the mac and click to split these in half so that those two sliders control the layer that you're currently on now what is the underlying layer control the underlying layer controls the layers that are below the currently selected layer so with the black point you can see that i can click and drag and watch what happens instead of hiding i'm actually bringing up the pixels i'm revealing the pixels and the reason that the circle disappears is because the background is gray and i think it'll be more obvious on this side notice that when i click and drag the white point see how i can start revealing the gradient below see that and once i get to that shade of gray that the background is then obviously it disappears here on top and i can do the same thing i can hold alt on windows option on the mac and click split it in half and create a smooth transition between visible and invisible pixels and again the underlying layer instead of hiding pixels it brings up the pixels from the layer below and it hides the pixels of the current layer now before we go any further let me go and make sure that we don't have any questions so let's see let me scroll up wow it's a lot of people here in the chat um cool oh we have uh my good friend colin smith from photoshop cafe here in the chat hey colin how's it going good to see you um if you haven't already make sure that you check out colin's youtube channel photoshop cafe um he has a lot of awesome tutorials and he also does a weekly stream also colin was my first guest on the photoshop training hour a couple weeks ago you might want to go and check out that video it was a fantastic fantastic stream we have sarah from italy good to see you uh sarah what part of italy are you in um i kind of speak italian i can understand it but i i can speak it okay so feel free to say something in italian in the chat and see if i can understand it um but yeah awesome thank you so much everyone i can just see a lot of people saying thank you thank you um yeah so this is going to be recorded so if you don't have time to watch it now you can just watch it later on um you can even if you watch it live you can always watch a recording if you want to reference back to something cool um jesus it would be great if you could share your sample images thank you yeah i'll make this available i'll post it on my website as well and i'll make it available so yeah no problem jorge um mr mir thank you for saying hello awesome so yeah let's let's continue with um blend if um another cool thing that a lot of people don't talk about in when explaining blend if and i think this is going to be something you probably haven't seen before so if you haven't seen it let me know in the chat if you've seen it also let me know um i think i might have talked about this once on my youtube channel i don't recall but the point is is that you know i already showed you in the this layer i can hide the black pixels right and i can hide the white pixels or the bright pixels how would i keep only the dark and bright and hide everything in between well if you wanted to do that you can just go drag this one to the right and then drag this one to the left and swap them see that so now i can only keep the shadows and highlights or the darkest and brightest pixels and then i can just hide everything in the middle see that so now i can just keep basically the shadows and the highlights and i can hide all the mid-tones and you can do that by just swapping those points across and i can also hold alt on windows option on the mac to create a smooth transition and you can create this this cool effect obviously um this this could have a lot of cool applications when you're blending textures blending all kinds of things with your images but that's something that i don't see a lot of people do swap those points in half so that you can hide the mid them you know like the midtones and just keep the highlights and shadows so that's a cool technique that i haven't seen a lot of people use let me know in the chat if you knew that already or not himanshu and i'm sorry if i mispronounced your name himanshu is saying that this is the first channel that he watched while learning photoshop so thank you so much for that peter says that he's never seen that swap trick before thanks you're welcome um that's what i try to do here show you guys uh tips and tricks that you probably haven't seen before um and obviously you can do the same thing with this bottom slider as well if you wanted to so you can always swap those and create really cool transitions so this whole time i've been talking about the um gray slider we're going to move on to the colors in a moment but before i do that i just want to show you like a quick actual example like how can you use all the information that i just gave you like how would that be applicable to a tiny little project and what you can do is in this example i can actually bring out the clouds and make it seem like that text is behind the clouds very very easily so it's only two layers it's a sky layer and this text layer that just has layer styles that create that effect there and i can come into this layer and again i can double click to the side of the layer or go into the effects icon and select blending options and from here i can think of the situation or think of the problem that i have or this or think of what my solution would be right so i have my clouds layer on top and i want to make sure that the the i'm sorry i have the text layer that reads clouds on top and i have the photo of the clouds in the back and i want to bring out the clouds so that they cover the text right so what color are the clouds or they're white essentially so that means that i need to work with the white on the underline layer so i can bring those forward so i can click and drag on this point here and see that see how the clouds start coming out like so super super cool but the problem is that the clouds have a sharp edge so remember earlier how i said that you can create a smooth transition between invisible and visible pixels well let's do that now you can hold alt on windows option on the mac and click split those in half and look at this super super cool so now it looks as if the clouds are coming in in front of that text and i can just click and drag this accordingly and it creates that cool effect so it's super super easy to do and this is this is just one example of how you can use blendiff to create effects maskings uh so let me rephrase that this is like a quick example of how you can mask and create cool effects just by using a few simple sliders let me see if there's any questions in the chat hello from the philippines thank you so much marky uh suman is asking if i tried using the affinity photo app i've never have um to me photoshop does everything that i needed to do um so efficient with it so any new tool will probably slow me down there's a lot of things that affinity photo does well from what i've heard but photoshop just does so much more in the end so um yeah what use of uh i'm guessing i think your question is about the knockout technique if we have time i'll talk about it it's also on the same panel we also have uh puetra from malaysia good to see you cool yeah if we have time we'll get into knockout so somebody remind me in the chat if we have a little time at the end um to explain the knockout technique which is also in that same panel awesome so that's one way in which you can use blend if so we also have this color wheel here that goes around the 360 degrees of colors so it starts in red goes all the way around until it gets back to red and what we're going to use for this color wheel is we're going to now talk about the red green and blue white red green and blue why those well red green and blue are the rgb channels if you open up your channels panel you can see the red channel the green channel and the blue channel now this is going to be an oversimplification but basically what these channels are are a combination of light that creates all the colors that you see you can think of these channels as masks if you want and basically anything that is dark in a given channel will not have light in the color of that channel and anything that is bright will have a lot of light in the color of that channel so in this case i'm in the red channel notice how the top part is very very bright and the bottom part is dark so then that means that the top part has a lot of red light whereas the bottom part has no red light when i enable the rgb composite you can see that the top part has a lot of red so it makes sense right we have a lot of red light so then therefore that part is going to be red the opposite side has cyan cyan is the opposite of red so it's going to have no red light which is why this channel shows the bottom part as black and the top part as white well what about the green channel well the green channel has a lot of light in this area and no light in this area is completely dark so then that should tell you that this side has a lot of green and this side has no green so when there is no green what is the opposite what should show well the answer is magenta so when i enable the rgb composite you can see that we have green here and the opposite of green is magenta and there it is and why don't we look at at blue now so blue is the next channel right so we have blue here the opposite of blue is yellow which is up here so then that means that that channel should have a lot of bright light here and just dark up here because the opposite of blue is yellow and when i click on blue in fact you can see that we have white here and black up here so i want you to think about these relationships and also think about black and white in this context because when we go back into the rgb composite and bring up the layer style window and we select one of these channels let's start with red notice now that we have black and white black and white sliders to be clear let me just move this better so you can see it right there so black and white sliders so if i drag the black slider what do you think will happen on the this layer remember the rgb channels i'll go back to it so that you can see this is the red rgb channel right we have white and we have black here at the bottom so when we go into the blend if and we select red we have the black point here and the white slider here or black slider and white slider so when i drag the whites up when i drag the black slider what do you think will happen to that image remember black was here at the bottom because the white light is on top or the bright areas on top meaning there's a lot of red light in that area and we have black at the bottom where there is no red light so we have black here i can click and drag and watch what happens see that see how we start making those pixels disappear the pixels that didn't have any red light see that and if i drag all the way to the end we're only left with the pixels that have a lot of red light in it and if i click and drag this point to the left notice what happens we get rid of all the pixels that have red light really really really cool right and of course you can also do the alt on windows option on the mac trick where you click on that point and it splits it in half you can see that there super super cool and you can obviously do the same thing for the black point and if you're wondering you can of course also flip these guys so that you only keep the pixels that have a lot of red light and no red light but then hide all the other ones in between so super super cool you can use that flip technique if you want the swapping slider technique let me see if we have any questions in the chat greetings from florida good to see you thank you so much for joining what part of florida are you and i used to go to um davey and fort lauderdale all the time love from india love from bangladesh love from egypt thank you so much uh wishing you a very healthy life i appreciate that thank you so much thankfully i'm very healthy at the moment um we have jose de leon from from puerto rico i would love to visit puerto rico i've never been there but i hear it's beautiful is this a good way to be saturated in color no this is definitely not a good way to desaturate i'm not really desaturating pixels i'm hiding pixels either showing them or hiding them completely or partially this has nothing to do with saturation please save this video of course this video will be saved it will be on my youtube channel cool so now let's look at the other channels if we go into the green channel what do you think will happen remember the channels right black and white where was the black where was the white in the green channel the black was on this side because the opposite of green is magenta magenta has no green light so that's where it's black in that channel so let me show you again just to remind you we go into the channels panel we go into green see that the black light is here the white light is here so when we open up blend if and we drag this black slider the black areas in that channel were up here because that's where we have no green light thus we have magenta i can drag this over and see that it disappears where was the white on that channel in the green area right because we're in the green channel so i can click and drag this over to the left see that and again i know i sound like a broken record hold on windows option on the mac to split these in half and create a smooth transition really really cool stuff and again you can do this the swap technique see that i'm swapping these guys like so super cool stuff and let me just bring these back to default here and go back into the blue channel blue is here i think by this point you will be able to just imagine it in your head so if we have a lot of blue light we're going to get blue right so then what color is that intensity of blue in the channel or what will you see will it be black white or a shade of gray well in the blue channel the areas that are completely blue will be white right a lot of blue light hitting that area and areas that have no blue light will be black and which will look yellow in the rgb composite so yellow will be black in the blue channel and blue will of course will be white in the blue channel so when i click and drag the black slider all the pixels that don't have a lot of blue light will disappear like so and if i drag the white slider all the pixels with blue will disappear see that super super cool and again the swap technique can give us that result there and of course alt on windows option on the mac and clicking splitting them in half creates a smooth transition like so so when you're working with blendiff and you're working with the individual channels it's always a good idea to go into the channels panel and just look at the channels panel and analyze each channel individually so that you can see what's white what's black and how you can use that to your advantage to create a mask or to hide or reveal the pixels that you want to reveal in your image let me give you an example of how you can use that if you wanted to take this image and do a sky replacement well it's actually very easy to do because if you notice the top part here is blue right so then there's probably going to be a lot of blue light there and everything else in this particular image is a different color there's green there's a little bit of yellow in there brown not blue so if you go into the channels panel you can just analyze these channels red green but look at the blue channel look how bright the sky is and how dark everything else is so then we can use this channel and blend they have to create a really really easy and quick sky replacement so i'll go back into the rgb composite by clicking on rgb go back into the layers panel and go into the blending options and very very easy i'm going to go into the blue channel remember on the this layer i can hide either the dark or bright pixels of any given channel i've selected the blue channel so if i click and drag on the white point look at what happens i can hide the bright pixels in that channel in this case the sky i can hold alt on windows option on the mac and click to split them in half and create a smooth transition between visible and invisible pixels that way it just creates a gradual transition and i don't have sharp edges like so and obviously you can spend some time fine tuning the image until you get a result that you like for your particular photo but in this case for this example this works fine and i can click and drag the sky layer the layer below and adjust it accordingly so that it matches my image right about here i would say and i don't have to worry about masking too much the branches and all those small details still show through of course i can always come back here and fine tune it even further so that i have a better transition between visible and visible pixels but again you can spend more time in your particular image adjusting that and it looks fantastic and i can click and drag it around now before i move on into the next thing let me take a quick look at the chat and see if there are any questions ebj said de i was born in mexicali baja california mexico that's where i'm from but i grew up in alameda california which is where my my father's side of the family is from that's where my father grew up alameda california and that's where he lived most of his life and as an adult he uh moved to mexico which is where i was born but then when i was a child we as a family came back to live in alameda california which is where my dad grew up and where i grew up um yeah so we both went to the same high school um let's see any other questions thank you so much for all the love i see a lot of people from all over the world i'm just sending their love so thank you so much jorge said outstanding tutorial thank you so much for that well um yeah i'm going to try to explain the knockout so i'll do the knockout um so peter i promise the hell to the knock that knockout and just in case i forget somebody start typing knockout like you know in 20 minutes if i haven't talked about it yet um i wasn't planning on talking about it but i think peter you might be the second or third person who has mentioned that so we'll definitely cover it um we have ernest from san benito south texas awesome sanderson from malawi i don't even know where that is oh my god i feel so bad i'm going to look it up yeah you can definitely use this effect for color grading your images jorge um so i'll i'll quickly talk about that because i want to talk about other things about blend if but since since it kind of relates to what we're talking about might as well do it now now i'm just going to warn you this is going to look terrible so don't judge it by the way that it looks this is the photo that i have and i just want to answer that question but it doesn't matter what the color adjustment that you're applying is right so i'm just going to select edgy amber for example so this is my adjustment layer and it could be multiple adjustment layers in a group it doesn't matter it's the same theory and just to have better real estate to work with i'm going to delete the layer mask but the question from jorge was can you use this to color grade you can definitely use this to color grade if you wanted to when you have an adjustment layer like that you can just hide the effect from certain areas so see that see how i can hide the effect from the shadows and just have it in the highlights or i can hide the effects from the highlights and just have it in the shadows so see that so this is how you can use it to color grade if you wanted to jorge so this is definitely something you can do and if you want to be fancy well you can use the technique that we talked about the the flip technique the swap technique there you go like i said it looks it looks terrible but you can definitely um you know have a better adjustment that will fit your image i just used something that was already there so that i can explain to you how you can use it to color grade but i'm sure you can like make it look much much better i hope that answers your question jorge let's see seth said hi sorry if i'm late for the class no worries seth there's always a recording we have uh larry from east africa nice to see you i've only been to west africa i've been to uh togo i've been to lome once so that's my only experience in africa wonderful people great food it was fantastic i would like to visit more places fantastic sky replacement thank you so much fernando said i rarely comment on your videos but your tutorials are very helpful thank you so much fernando i appreciate the comment ceci from bulgaria how's it going ceci good to see you velino watching from the philippines hey how's it going when will you blend that banana just in case you guys don't know the banana here um it's just uh under the edit toolbar is usually three dots and if you hold shift and click on done that will add a banana to your toolbar if you want to get rid of it do the same thing but hold alt on windows option on the mac and that would get rid of it when you click undone we have a dunny monster watching from the uk what part of the uk are you in dunny i've been to a lot of places in the uk i've been to london manchester liverpool bath brighton where else have i gone um [Music] louis and a whole bunch of other places in between uh press switch cool awesome so now what i want to focus on is one thing that's very important we created the sky replacement by using blend if and in a lot of photoshop projects you obviously will have adjustments right you may want to enhance the image by increasing or decreasing the brightness hue saturation whatever of a photo this is going to be an extreme effect so obviously you probably would never do this specific thing but it will help me explain a problem and then a solution so i created this levels adjustment layer and if i were to make an adjustment to this image like you see uh here notice that the sky starts disappearing why is the sky disappearing well the sky is disappearing because we reveal the sky by using a blend based on the luminosity of a channel when we go into the channels panel look at the blue channel now it's uh actually why is that is it that not working let me try again here we go blue channel notice how it's now much grayer it's no longer white all the channels have changed right that's because we or we adjusted the brightness of the image so then that changes the brightness of the blue channel and therefore it changes the blend right so how can we actually have transparency right now we don't have transparency even if i delete this adjustment layer look at the layer thumbnail you can still see in the layer thumbnail that we have the original sky see that the layer thumbnail here we have the original sky so then we have no transparency we have a blend how can we create transparency from that blend it's actually really really easy to do all you need to do is right click on the layer and convert it into a smart object once you do that look at the layer thumbnail see the layer thumbnail we have the transparency checkboard texture on there the the checkerboard where the sky was as you probably know the checkerboard pattern that you see on in photoshop that pattern there that implies transparency so in the layer thumbnail you can see the checkerboard here so that means that there's actual transparency when i create a levels adjustment and clip it to the layer below and do the same thing it doesn't matter how much i adjust the image the blend is not going to change because we have actual transparency now and if you wanted to change the layer maybe you realize that you made a mistake or you just want to fine tune it a little bit you can always double click on the smart object it opens up in a new tab and from here you can double click on that and you can continue making your adjustment fine tune it press ok close it save it and it will update on the smart object and you can continue working on your composite or your working document i should say so remember right click convert to smart object so that you can work with actual transparency and not just the blend because if you're using adjustment layers or any type of adjustment to change the luminance luminosity saturation or what have you from your image then that could potentially change the channel that you use to blend the image and if you change the channel you change the blend i hope that made sense let me know if you have any questions in the comments jesus your tutorials are life-saving thank you so much payman i appreciate that rameen said i understand am i a genius or are you a good teacher you're probably a genius that's my guess greetings from the bahamas never been on the bahamas but i would love to visit sometime thank you so much for watching thank you so much for watching from bangladesh isn't it possible to apply modification to just the layer um just i'm not exactly sure what you mean by that question but if if you mean what i think that you mean um yeah i can make an adjustment to just the layer but the problem is that if i adjust the layer i also adjust the channel or the you know like the overall brightness of the image then the blend changes so i have to convert it into a smart object to get actual transparency so that i could adjust the layer as much as i want without it changing the blend cool and here's another example um i'm just going to clip this to a layer below you can select the texture ctrl alt g on windows command option g on the mac and now i i have this texture on this piece of text and i can double click on on here and i can just make any adjustments that i want see i can hide the dark pixels and just keep the brighter pixels on top or i can hide the brighter pixels and keep the rust here at the bottom like so or i can do the flip thing that i showed you guys earlier and just keep a little bit of both see that super super cool right so very very powerful blend if i highly recommend that you use it you can do so many so many things with it and yeah i hope that you enjoyed everything i had to say about blender we still have some time so i'm going to get into the knockout technique i've been having that in the back of my head since a lot of you people were asking about it so let me cancel this and just think about how i'm going to show it to you guys because i wasn't planning on teaching it so now i have to have to create a new document and just figure out how i'm going to show you guys um mean let me just find an image here i think this image of paris should work sorry about that i wasn't planning on showing you this but there was a lot of questions in the chat about it so why not i feel like not a lot of people talk about knockout anyway so might be something that most people don't know and what i'm gonna do is create um a grading map or something no not a gradient oh yeah greater map should work um i'm just thinking out loud here about how i'm gonna i'm gonna teach this um so let me just remove that [Music] and so paris right paris i'm going to put this on top here okay so if i wanted to create an effect where the word paris was hiding the color effect and of course i can create a selection out of my my text here you can load a text layer or any layer as a selection by holding ctrl and windows command on the mac and clicking on the thumbnail and it loads it as a selection then you can delete the layer mask and create a layer mask right and then you can decide the layer and there it is and actually let me do the other way around like that so maybe that's the effect that you want to go for right i know might not look great but i think it'll help showcase how the feature works um the problem with doing this is that you don't have editable text right if you wanted to change the word paris to france for example well then you have to do the whole thing all over again right and it's not letting me type why it's not letting me type let me try that one more time there we go um parrot uh not paris friends friends and you know i would have to center it and do the whole the whole thing all over again right oh here's the trick to centering if you hold ctrl a on windows command and the mac with the move tool active you can just center by clicking on this icon here because you create a selection around the canvas and then you just center to the canvas but anyway notice now that i will not need to redo the whole thing right so select friends delete this and create a layer mask and hide it and invert it and do all that stuff right so that obviously takes a lot of work and it's not flexible because if i need to change my text i need to change the mask and it's just very very inconvenient right so the ideal situation would be that i i could use this text layer as a mask keep it editable and that'd be awesome so how can we do that that's where knockout comes from so if i put these two into a group you can select layers by holding shift and clicking on on them and then pressing ctrl g on windows command g on the mac to put them into a group so now we have these inside of a group then i can go into the friends layer and i can go into knockout and just do shallow and bring down the fill opacity and look at that it gave me the same result so what knockout is doing is literally knocking a hole through the group and all the layers in that group but nothing outside of the group so no matter how many layers i have in this group the text layer that's on top will punch a hole through everything down to the very last layer in that group in this case only have one layer in that group it doesn't matter i could have a thousand it will still push through to the very bottom layer and it creates that effect exactly the same thing as earlier it's just a mask right so now i can come in here and i can type in paris if it lets me type it paris see that so it creates exactly the same effect as having a mask but it's editable super super cool stuff so now you can start imagining imagining that if you use something like a variable data set like you know in photoshop you can create like multiple images based on variables and multiple images i don't know what to total in that on my channel i should make one but anyway um you can see how how this um [Music] technique could help you generate um a bunch of images off of data sets because now you're not creating layer mask you're just using a text layer and it works as a mask so that's what knockout does now there's another option here called deep what does deep do well deep look at that deep just punches a hole through everything no matter what it just keeps punching a hole all the way down and we get transparency complete transparency so no matter what i have in this in this layer stack it's going to punch a hole through everything and create transparency the only way that it wouldn't create transparency is if this bottom layer was a background layer so if i go into layer new background from layer then notice what happens here the deep option punches through everything except a background layer if you don't have a background layer you'll get transparency if you have a background layer then you'll get whatever that layer is so in this case it creates the same effect that i had before i usually don't use deep when i work i usually use shallow because i can control shallow with a group and again no matter how many layers i put in that group it the shallow effect would only go to the very last layer in that and or cut through all the layers in that group but not anything outside of it so for example if i added another layer here and i mean this is going to look terrible and i paint it over it notice that the effect shows see that's the other actually so you can see it better maybe i should make it red let's see that see how it's not going to look red unless i go into to where the text is see that and if i drag that in here that disappears because anything that is in that group will disappear if the knockout layer is on top if it's outside of the group it'll show so that's what i mean you can put as many layers as you want in there and the knockout will just knock right through it so i hope that made some sense let me see if there's any comments or questions in the chat a new difference is saying enjoying your content as per usual thank you so much you're watching from saint lucia in the caribbean awesome avanash from india movie garage is saying amazing love from pakistan thank you so much peter lewis is saying been working nearly full time in photoshop for over 20 years and i learn stuff from you every time thanks thank you so much peter greetings from brazil awesome good to see you nisellio i'm sorry if i mispronounced your name cool awesome yeah so that's that's how knockout works i actually knocked it out excuse the pun faster than i thought i would so we still have a few moments let me know if you have any questions or anything that i can answer for you how can we effectively use blender for working with porch as well i mean that's a very generic question right there's so many things that you can do with blendiff while working with portraits i mean [Music] you know i mean there's so many applications i'm just trying to think of of something i could show you now um let me see if i have a portrait here um i guess i'll just type in portrait and see what i have saved here okay this might not be the best portrait but it's what i have there's i mean there's so many things you can do right um for example you might i mean i know this is gonna be just a very simple effect but you know you might be using curves to adjust the image right you know you create some contrast and you realize you know what i don't want this curves effect to affect the highlights just a shadow as well bring up blend if and hide the effect from everything except the shadows hold alt on windows option on mac click and drag and split it in half and now that particular effect is only affecting the shadows and of course you can start introducing you know color in there and all kinds of cool things to you know adjust the image and start creating some really cool effects so it's just a matter of of thinking of an effect that you want to apply to an image and how you can target that specific thing another thing maybe for example this is probably the worst example but let's just assume that you were you know fixing the person's skin tones right you know in your painting with color here and then you probably would change the blending mode to color or something like that i know that in this case this actually might not be that bad of an example so you can see here that when i painted over the the shadows it kind of darkened that area you may not want your painting effect to to darken everything or to be applied to everything so then you can just double click to decide a layer and then hide that paint from these darker areas alt windows option on the mac to split them in half and just create a smooth transition there so it affects the the image but not necessarily destroy your shadows see that so that's one way another way in which you can use blend if on a portrait cool 805 at nora said made all all the sense there is to it finally i get the shallow deep explain from sweden awesome cool what is the difference between fill and opacity actually i have did i publish it already i i don't know if i published that tutorial already uh no i haven't so the next tutorial that i published will answer that question but i'll tell you i'll tell you what it is so the difference between uh phillip an opacity in the context of a layer um so there's there's two really i mean there's more but two main things you you always gotta keep in mind number one is when you create um let me just do a text layer because i think the text layer will just help me explain this so fill right that's fill so when i reduce the opacity it reduces the opacity if i reduce the fill it reduces the opacity so what's the difference well when you have a layer style um let me just reset this list reset to default list and i'll do um i'll do let me think of what be the best to show you i'll do a stroke stroke right increase my stroke and i'll do that inside like so and i'll make it black like so so when i i have a layer style when i reduce the opacity it reduces both the opacity of the original pixels and the pixels generated by the layer style when i reduce fill it reduces the opacity of the original pixels but not the pixels generated by the layer style so that allows you to create really cool effects because now i can come in here and i can start adding something like i don't know we'll see like a drop shadow let's see yeah drop shadow and i can click and drag this out like so and maybe you know make that white or something i don't know what would be the best maybe change that to this i don't know you know i think you get the idea you can create some some cool cool effects just by using that technique because the original pixels are no longer there and you're just using basically them almost like a stencil necessarily a stencil but like because it doesn't have to be a stencil effect basically you can just hide the pixels that were originally there and only keep the ones created by the layer style i mean for example in this case we can just go in here and hide the stroke and just make this into um a regular shadow let me crease that blur it like so see that effect there crease it see that that's another effect that you can create we hid the original pixels only kept the layer styles by using the fill slider another thing that you can do with opacity and fill is by with blending modes for example one of there's eight blending modes and i'll show you what they are in a moment um you can paint with white like so and if you go into color dodge when you reduce opacity and fill they look different you get different results and also if you uncheck transparency shape layers the blend looks a little different and you can almost use this as a specular highlight so you can imagine like a really bright light hitting this guy see that we got really bright light hitting his head there and i can use the fill to control the intensity and that only works with um a blending mode so there's 27 blending modes they except for eight fill and opacity gives you the exact result for eight of them they give you different results and you can uncheck the transparency shapes layers checkbox to get a different blend so let me let me pull up this page on my website give me one second um here we go there is this page on my website here called blending modes explain the complete guide to photoshop blend modes and you can just type in blend modes on google and i'm sure you'll find it or you know photoshop training channel blend modes and we have a section here if we scroll down i'm gonna get to it oh wait that i already pass it yeah i did pass it here we go um these these are the eight blending modes uh color burn linear burn color dodge leader dodge add vivid light linear light are mix and difference so these are the eight blending modes that give you different results when you adjust opacity compared to fill and you can also uncheck that transparency checkbox the transparency shapes layers checkbox that you see here that one there when you uncheck that you also get a different blend so that's the biggest differences between fill and opacity when talking about the layers panel i hope that answers your question [Music] let me see if there's any other questions yes you can click and drag drop shadows that's right when you apply a drop shadow on the layer style you can click and drag drop shadows so let me just add a drop shadow here you can see it drop shadow there it is you can click and drag it see that and if you have the use global lights the light in the scene will adjust accordingly let me increase that so you can see the highlights and when i go into drop shadow notice how the highlights also change accordingly so that it matches the shadow by because i'm using use global light that's checked here and that's also checked right here okay so the question is um several layers okay so yeah so the thing is if you have several layers the question is um i'll read it uh when i have several layers in a group with several blend modes sometimes i need to collapse that group and not lose the effect is there a way to maintain everything like inside of the group so the short answer is maybe depending on on the order of the layers what the effect is doing um so i'll answer that question this way it depends short answer is this let me think of the best way to show this um if you maybe we can do with this image let me see if you have a group and you know we'll just make this like overlay or something or actually you know what i think that this layer is not the best for what i'm trying to explain and answer that question so we'll just use red i'll paint with red and we'll change it to like overlay or something right and then you have another layer and it's like i don't know blue or something and in this case we have like i don't know we'll make it something very different um do exclusion or something and you want to collapse these there's really no way that you're going to be able to keep that effect if you press ctrl e on windows command option e on the mac to to merge the group you're going to lose the blend mode because there are two different blending modes so there's no no real way of keeping that and if you change the blending mode to something like normal you'll lose that effect as well by the way the default blending mode is um pass through when you change the blending mode to normal you what you're really doing is essentially merging the group without merging it so that's what how what photoshop does does behind the scenes it essentially makes it all into one layer so to speak or at least the outcome is the same but you still get to keep the layers um so to answer your question there's no real way of doing that if your scenario is something like this where all the blending modes are different but if say the blending was in there or both you know like we'll say overlay or something actually i want something that actually shows through oh did i not change the blending mode to yeah pass through so if the blending modes in there are both say overlay well then yeah you can merge the layers and then you know make it into overlay you get the same result or just change the group blending mode to overlay and you get the same result but i know that's probably not the your case because then you probably would have not asked the question so if there are different blending modes inside of that group you can't merge them and keep the effect or somehow collapse them all into one and keep the effect i don't know if that made any sense um let me know if that answer your question and you know what guys like we spent so much time on here that i forgot to mention one thing which is the um sponsors for today's video msi so this is my msi prestige 15 laptop so i highly recommend it this is a laptop that i use it uses a 4k display true color technology very important 100 adobe rgb the delta e 2 color accuracy is kalman certified it has the true pixel display this is a laptop that i use this is the laptop that i'm going to be using while i'm traveling in my cross country road trip in the next couple of weeks and the laptop that i'll be streaming from the next time you see me for the photoshop training hour highly highly recommend this laptop also the desktop that i'm currently streaming from is the aegis ti5 it's an awesome powerful beast of a computer highly recommended msi um aegis ti5 make sure that you check it out it's got a powerful rtx 3080 graphics card with an i9 processor it's fantastic highly recommended and the monitor that i have to my right here is a creator ps3 21qr 32 inch display 2560x1440 display and it has adobe rgb at 99 percent dci p3 at 95 and srgb at 99 so thank you msi for sponsoring today's stream make sure that you check out these products and thank you everybody so much for joining me i hope that you learned a lot and i hope that you found the tips and tricks in this tutorial useful and beneficial to you and your projects let me know in the chat what technique or tip you enjoyed the most i love to learn to see what you learn and what you enjoyed also again next week i'm going to be traveling so i'm planning on finding a place that has good wi-fi so that i can stream to you from the road and we'll do another photoshop training hour i'm not sure where in the country will be but i am flying to north carolina tonight and by monday i will be on the road going along the coast all the way up to vermont so i'm gonna go to dc uh new york new jersey connecticut i'll be in boston i'll be in all these different places so i hope that by the time that i the next next week comes around when i have to do a stream i can find the place with solid wi-fi so that i can stream another photoshop training hour for you guys so thank you so much for joining me i look forward to seeing you again very soon and have a wonderful weekend thank you so much for watching and i'll talk to you guys soon thanks so much

Channel: Photoshop Training Channel

Views: 43,998

Rating: 4.9189053 out of 5

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Id: dHU03kD6Q90

Length: 59min 34sec (3574 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 18 2021