5 most useful LAYER BLENDING modes in Photoshop

layer blending modes are amazing in photoshop and right now i'm going to show you the five most useful layer blending modes hey cafe crew it's colin smith here from photoshop cafe and today we're looking at one of my favorite features and that is layer blending modes layer blending modes are good for saving you a lot of time and creating really amazing looks in pretty much one click now this is not a comprehensive video i'll give you a link underneath to my comprehensive tutorial right now we're going to look at the five most useful blending modes so layer blending modes when we click on a layer inside the layer panel we see the layer blending modes and by changing this we change the way this layer interacts with the layer underneath now normal blending mode obviously is the most useful because that's the default but we're not talking about that right now all right so here we've got some black text against a white background something you'll come across quite often when you scan and do different things like that now we want to get rid of the white i could use selections to get rid of it but the problem is it's going to take time especially trying to get in all these little holes in here and also what it's going to do is it's not going to give you a perfect edge it's much easier to choose a blending mode that hides white so the first blending mode we're going to look at is click over here under normal so the first one we're going to go down to is multiply this top set hides white now darken would work too but notice it doesn't quite give you the punch to the text as multiply blend mode does now notice too that the overlay is happening in this version of photoshop if you're using an earlier version of photoshop you might not see this overlay so let's choose multiply right now and there we go let's click to 100 and here we go we've got nice clean black text as if it was printed right on here now let me just show you something quickly if this was reversed and so we've got white text sitting on a black background we need the opposite blending mode and if we go under here instead of this top step we're going to go to the next one and there's two options lighten and screen screen does exactly the same as multiply except the opposite it hides black and it shows white now i'm going to show you another use for screen mode but before we do if you aren't subscribed yet hit that subscribe button right now and turn on notifications to get new tutorials from me and also hit that like button that's the thumbs up okay here we are inside of a composite and i did mention that i wanted to show you another use so let's create a new layer so right now we've got a new layer we're going to drag it all the way to the top now what i'm going to do is i'm going to apply a lens flare i want to put a lens flare in here but it's very difficult to know where it's going so if we fill this with black and just hit the d key to reset the foreground background color option delete and that would be alt delete on windows will fill that layer with black now we're going to apply a lens flare in the middle filter render lens flare now if these are grayed out make sure you're in rgb mode and not cmyk let's choose a lens flare just for fun we'll go with this default one and we're going to click ok now you see the lens flare over the top what we want to do is hide everything else and show the image underneath we don't want to cut it out we want to go under our blend modes and we're going to move down to our screen notice that the screen mode shows this a lot better so we could click on here and we could reposition where we want our lens flare maybe we want it to go right on the tip of your wand right there okay let's go to our third blending mode which is one that you've seen and maybe not used or understood it and that's difference mode now this is a utilitarian mode and let me show you how it should be used okay so we've got two copies here of our model taylor and notice that we can move that around and sometimes you want to perfectly align two things so sometimes you might do this say for example you're cutting out a person and then you want to cut out the hair separately and you need to align it here's how to check for perfect alignment let's zoom in and with the top one we're going to change this to different blending mode now if you thought it was aligned before it now you can see it's not see the difference there and as i move it it's going to go solid black when we get solid black we now have perfect alignment and then from this point you would go back to the other blend mode that you wanted to work in and notice now we've thickened out the hair a little bit by doubling up on that all right let's go to another blend mode but before we do let me give you a tip here's a bonus tip to change the modes as you know inside of photoshop cc or photoshop 2020 or newer you can go down here and you can just scroll down and you can see these overlays but how do you check these in earlier versions so what you want to do is you want to make sure the move tool is selected that's the v key then you're going to hold down the shift key and watch these blend modes right now it's in normal if i hit the shift plus notice now we're cycling through the different blend modes and you can see on screen if you see one that you like and you want to go back keep holding down that shift key and just tap the minus key and now we're going through them backwards that's how we cycle through all the layer blending modes and by the way i've got a free ebook i want to give you on layer blending modes yep it's just pure content no advertising i'll give you a link to it underneath okay number four and by the way you're gonna love number five i'm saving the best to last number four is overlay blending mode what overlay blending mode does is it hides fifty percent let me demonstrate if i create a new layer and i click on the color swatch and then i say b for brightness to 50 and i click ok and then i hit the alt or option key to fill it with gray we can see right now that we've got gray now if i change this into overlay blending mode notice it makes that gray invisible now this has a lot of purposes and a lot of uses one of them is if you want to use the dodge and burn tools so say i choose the dodge tool here and this is going to lighten things up and now if i switch the burn tool i'm going to drop the opacity to 40 i can paint in shadows and a nice thing about using the burn tool versus using just a straight color as i can't go over the edges notice it's not painting into the white so i don't have to worry about masking those edges all right and if we look at this before and after you can see how we were able to add a lot of depth and realism and this works on all your photos illustrations whatever you want alright so let's go to number five most useful blending mode and that's the color mode the color blending mode preserves all the detail inside the photograph and only changes the color want to change the color of eyes hair whatever clothing in this case butterfly very easy create a new layer just by clicking on the new layer icon once again go to our favorite blending modes and we are going to go down here to color now i just want to mention something quickly notice there's five groups of layer blending modes and we've done one from each we haven't done color yet but we will the first set is darken so the darkened mode works with the darker tones and hides white the lightened tones they hide black and work with the lighter tones so we've got darks lights and the overlay works at the mid tone so these were 50 gray and around those mid tones work in different ways then we've got our utilitarian ones such as difference exclusion subtract divide and then finally we've got our color ones which we're working with right now and we're going to select color now with the color mode all i need to do is choose a color let me go back to my regular color and why don't we pick a green nothing like a nice green butterfly this time of the year grab our paint brush and now we're going to paint and look at this i can make this butterfly green what if i want to make it blue no problem let's change the color to blue and i've actually seen some this color they're really nice and i could change it here or we could just do little spots like that or of course we could go down here and we could change the colors there as well in fact we can make them any color we want we could go in and paint these individually if we wanted like stained glass windows so as you can see there there was five very useful layer blending modes all right so i got a question for you what's your favorite layer blending mode let me know in the comments underneath and also let me know if you learned anything new this week by the way if you're new first of all welcome to the cafe crew great to have you here hit the subscribe button and turn on the notifications and you'll be part of the crew and get a new tutorial every single week and by the way every tuesday we upload a video every thursday at 1 p.m pacific time we do a live stream for one hour and every weekend right now we're doing back to basics weekends where we do some kind of a basic technique inside of photoshop so that's three times a week we upload if you like this smash the like button into dust until next time i'll see you at the cafe you

Channel: photoshopCAFE

Views: 25,363

Keywords: photoshop, tutorial, photoshop tutorial, learn photoshop, how to, photography, colin smith, photoshopcafe, colin smith tutorial, photoshopcafe tutorial, adobe photoshop, layer blending modes, blending modes, best blending modes, most important blending modes, blending layers, blend images in photoshop, blending photos in photoshop, photoshop layer blending modes, photoshop blending modes, photoshop blend, blend in photoshop, merge in photoshop, collage, digital art

Id: NS-MAHzPO60

Length: 10min 49sec (649 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 21 2020