5 Ways Blend If in Photoshop Will Blow Your Mind!

in the first bonus video of the zone systems master class we're going to talk about five ways that blend if and that layer Styles is going to blow your mind now blend if I've done some tutorials on this in the past as a very powerful technique so powerful to the point that once I started playing with it discovering it and experimenting with it I revamp the entire digital zone system to include blend if options every action well let's say almost every action and the new digital Zone system action includes blend if to include the new zone system has the new zones in there it's a very powerful technique so what I want to do is kind of set you up for what you can expect to see in the zone systems master class by showing you five ways that you can use blend if right now in your workflow to make some very difficult tasks extremely simple the first one is going to be sharpening we're talk about how we can sharpen our images using blend if and a very deliberate way we're then going to go into noise reduction same thing very deliberate noise reduction that we only want that noise reduction to be in our shadows saturation boosting this one is really interesting you can actually use blend if to make a really nice saturation boost in your photographs and it's really quick and really simple and get a lot of color control over too well then jump into the fourth method which is vignettes how you can add a nice blended vignette to your image so that your highlights don't get lost in the confusion of of and yet they pop through nicely and neatly in your photos and then texturing photos how you can use textures in your images with these blended principles in mind so really getting the best possible blend in your photos that you can possibly get for those textures with this included in this as a download for the extras you can download this video as well as the four methods you see there at the top the sharpening noise reduction saturation and yes there's actions for those and then the fifth method you can download the textures that I use in this video so lots of extras go along with it you can using these right away let's go ahead and jump into Photoshop and we'll look at method number one the first mind-blowing blend if method we're gonna look at is sharpening so the beauty of this sharpening method is you can use it pretty much anywhere in your workflow because with these protective measures in place it's not going to take a stamp basically of what your image looks like you can do it anywhere in your workflow and you can move that layer anywhere you please so if we look at this I've been using the we'll go back to the very beginning here the digital zone system color zone system that's some of my contrast equalizer one of the new actions you'll find in the zone systems master class did some beach cleanup a little contrast adjustments here and then a nice little vibrance adjustment for the sky so at this point I could call this image done or I could sharpen it because when I look at this rock I really want this rock to be really sharp but I don't want to sharpen all of my highlight areas and typically sharpening methods will globally sharpen the entire photo and that's exactly what I want to shy away from so I'm going to do is press ctrl shift alt and E to merge all of these down and that's basically going to make a stamp of everything that's going on below here so what I do is go to filter go to other and go to high-pass I'm going to make this high pass something like point seven just a very light high pass to the point that when i zoom in here you can just barely see it all right and we're going to change that to linear light we change it to linear light you can see when we zoom in here that that rock now has a lot of detail on it it's really been souped up but if we look in the background here so is our background and it's made the background noise a lot more prominent so what I'm going to do is use these blend if options to protect anything in that lower layer below so I'm going to double click here and here we have our blend if options down here if you've never seen these before they're pretty interesting so let me go ahead and zoom into here while I do this and I want to protect my harsh shadow areas from that so anything really deep in these pits I want to I want to blend those areas and so they are protected from this sharpening and I also want to protect anything that's up in my sky so I'll move this to the left and you can see let's zoom in here real close almost at the pixel base here as I move this to the left you can see that that that sharpening is no longer taking effect on the back of that sky I was even a little bit closer so now it doesn't take effect but I don't want to just bring it all the way over here because all of the highlight areas then are going to be adjusted that way so I'll bring it over to the left and then press alt or option and split it so it gets a nice little feather that's definitely one of those techniques you want to use is that feathering those edges in so you don't have these harsh adjustments that are being made so when we zoom out we'll go ahead and press ok and let's look at our before and after so you typically won't see anything before and after on the big picture scale but let's zoom in here and look at our before and after before here's after we have a nice sharpened effect that is really only affecting we look here our mid-tones the only really this area right in between these spots are where my sharpening is now taking effect and now with this layer here that's those areas as they appear above here we can move this layer down and anywhere this layer is it's still going to keep those protective measures in place so it doesn't matter where the sharpen layer is in your stack it will still protect your stack in that order from that sharpening the second mind-blowing method we can use blend therefore is noise reduction and typically with noise reduction I only want to reduce my noise most of the time in the shadow areas because that's typically where that noise likes to reside is usually in that under 128 pixel mark so under that gray medium gray mark into your black areas as typically where noise is going to reside the most doesn't typically bother us too much in our sky if we look at this image here noise in the sky can't really see it but then if we go down here to the noise and the shadow areas it sticks out like a sore thumb so how do we do this well we're just going to make a duplicate layer so we're going to press command or control J on this background layer I'm going to go to filter we're going to go to noise and go to reduce noise so I'm going to do a pretty hefty noise reduction here I'm going to keep that strength pretty high up in about that 10 let's look at this preserved details let's actually keep that pretty low let's keep that at that 10% mark there it's definitely reduced that color noise it's a good idea about 50% do we want to sharpen any details after we do that not necessarily we'll keep that pretty low at about 15% and we'll press okay so after the noise reduction runs let's go ahead and zoom in on an area where that noise reduction has taken place if we look that's a very global adjustment it's taking place over the entire image so what we need to do is double click here now with the slider on the right we want to protect anything that is pretty much below the mid-tone area so let's go below 128 because 128 is our mid-tone press alt or option and split this over and let's just see about where we are so here's the before here's the after I think we could even go down a little bit less yeah that looks good about right there and when we split this little bit more so really all this being affected our shadow areas our shadow areas from zero or zone zero all the way into about zone three to four and we'll press ok so now we click that off you can see that the noise reduction is only taking place where in those shadow areas and it's protecting anything else that's in that above the mid-tone area so the noise is being reduced on the shadows and not being reduced anywhere else is an excellent technique when you want to really reduce that noise in the shadows but make sure that everything else doesn't get that same global effect best way to control it easiest way to control it is right there with the blend if options the third method I'm going to show you how to use blend if really well with with our workflow is a saturation boost so you can see this image right here the contrast looks looks alright but the saturation just isn't quite there and now I can do some really tedious things with my saturation adjustment slider by moving some greens up and some blues up and doing this and doing that and try to get the hues right and everything but let's look at a way that we can make a really quick adjustment with the vibrance adjustment layer so I'll go to the vibrance adjustment layer I'm just going to boost that vibrance all the way up boost that saturation up quite a bit here to maybe the plus 30 mark I would never do this to my photos because it's such a global edit that just really blows out all the saturation or washes out the color it's not a very good thing to do because there's no control but if we double click here and we go into our blend if options we now get the ability to protect our shadows and our highlights from any of that excess saturation so I can go in here to the blacks and if I move this to the right you can start to see how everything starts to get resurrected in those black areas so I'm just I don't really want to move this up too far because I don't want to lose that so I'm just going to go right outside of zone 0 so basically zone 0 is anywhere from 0 to 20 so I'm going to protect everything from 0 to 20 so 0 to 20 is not going to get any saturation boost and then I'll press alt or option and split this you'll start to sleep see how the color starts to slowly edge away from those shadow areas same thing here with the highlights the highlights going to be 235 to 255 so I'll bring this down so that pure white stays pure white doesn't gain that saturation increase and split this slider to press alt or option so you can see as we do that we get this nice clean saturation boost but we can take it even a step further I mean going to the color blue and we can say you know what maybe I want to protect the color blue from any of that saturation we'll just move this slider over to the left press alt or option to split it so it's not so harsh and now all of our pure Blues don't have to worry about any of that adjustment on them as well so it's a really nice easy way that we can go into our colors boost our colors and have complete control with the blend if options as is just how much is happening here if we go into our history and we unclick that blend option you can see that wow that saturation was pretty powerful but now it's nice and protected really quick easy way to boost that saturation without destroying the image the fourth way that we use blend if in a really creative way is to use a vignette now this image is kind of dying to have a vignette on it because everything around the edges is so white and I really want to bring your attention right towards that Center focal point so I'm going to do that with a very protective vignette so what I do is I'm going to create a new layer press shift f5 to fill it with black and now I've got a pure black photo I'm going to drop that opacity down to about 75% and I'm going to add a mask to it and on that mask I'm going to paint with black right on this mask make my brush a little bigger pressing right bracket key I'm just going to click right there in the center so you can see we've got this nice powerful vignette now it really does draw your eye right to the middle but also what it's doing is that when a vignette gets applied to an area that is white look what happens it looks like tone compression it looks like a very like an area that should be white as a gray wash over it and we can protect those areas we can double click in here go in to blend if and again we can move this over so that nothing in that pure white area will get covered with the vignette to about 235 which will be our zone 10 and then we can press alt or option we can split this as we split it you can start to see that anything that's a highlight starts to peek through so we'll go and press ok and we'll look at the before and after on that one that was a before lots and lots of really bad looking tone compression happening especially over here but then we go to that blending option we can start to see little bits of our highlights that are peeking out through that vignette this is an extremely powerful technique to use alongside of and yet so that you can maintain those highlights so those highlight areas are not washed out with that vignette that you place overtop of it another thing is it makes it vignette look very subtle it makes it almost looked as if we didn't take this picture with the vignette from the lens or even maybe do a vignette afterwards it's a very subtle vignette that just works in a in a way that you can pull your viewer in separate the highlights shadow areas really kind of push and pull the eye around that than yet all right let's look at our fifth and final creative mind-blowing method for using blended options in Photoshop so typically when we go to texture a photo we have our textures over here we bring in a texture and we drop that texture right on top of our image by just moving this over by pressing holding shift and then we'll just go and press command ctrl T to make this entire texture fill the entire image and then we do something like soft light and that gives us a nice texture over our photo right makes it look kind of old-school like an old photo we can really drive that point home if we want to by making this black and white that'll really give us a nice feel to this photo but let's say I don't want these scratches to be all over the entire photo I don't want to play with the il L bit here if I double click on here we can protect any areas of black or white in our photos so you can see as I move this to the right I'm starting to protect that lighthouse and the rocks and the roof so I move this over to the right it's protecting those areas and then I'll just split it by pressing alt or option I can do the same thing with my highlights so if i press alt or option i can feather this in so it doesn't affect the highlights quite as much so it's not a stark obviously if I move this one over to the right or the farm panel front on the right to the left it's going to make the whole thing disappear because we have a lot of white in that background area so I'll just press that alter option to split so the effect is a little less it's almost the same as using the opacity and dropping the opacity down now let's make sure that no color comes through so press control shift U so we have no color coming through that's one way that we can apply a texture using blend if but there's another way we can apply a texture using blend if so just grab this texture drag it and drop it over fill this entire scene ctrl T boom okay so if we look at this we can do the same thing or we change this to soft light but that's going to make it almost look exactly like it did before so let's do something else let's keep this at normal and go into our blend if options this is where the magic presses on to the right so we're really protecting all those shadow areas we move this over a little bit and split it feather it get a nice little transition there we do the same with our highlights move this over and talk about there and then feather it so really start to get that old-school feel on this photo again we can press control-shift you if we don't want that residual color and now we have a really old-school looking photo that looks like it's been sitting in a pile of photos for a very long time when in actuality this was taken just last month with the sony a6000 wasn't even printed on film from a boat on a lighthouse cruise it was a good time so I've shown you five really creative ways now to use blend if in your workflow we talked about sharpening you don't want to sharpen your shadows or your highlights you only really want to sharpen those mid-tones so you protect those areas by moving those sliders in we talked about noise reduction and how you only really want to reduce the noise in your shadows so you protect the highlights and the mid tones using blend if but then we didn't talked about saturation and now we can boost the saturation in a photo without even touching the hue/saturation adjustment area we just do it right through the vibrance layer really boost up that vibrance boost up that saturation and blend it in using our blend if options it's another option another tool that we have in our tool kit that can be used really creatively to boost an image we very well could have done that with saturation but it's just easier and quicker to do it with vibrance we then looked at how you could use a vignette and blend and blow that vignette into your image so that your highlights pull through that vignette so it doesn't look like you're just late a vignette overtop of your image your highlights actually get room to breathe so it doesn't look like tone compression in there by protecting those highlight areas on that underlying layer from the vignette and lastly we talked about textures here and I use textures the normal way by changing it to soft light and then maybe using your blend if options to make the blacks and the whites and your image pull through and then we looked at how you could just use a big texture without using soft light now you can blend and blur that using those layer styles and the blend if options in the zone systems master class the entire digital zone system has been revamped and utilizes a lot of this blend if almost every action in there utilizes blend if options thank you very much for watching this and also remember that you are free to download the extras and the video below to add to your zone system master class collection you

Channel: f64 Academy

Views: 130,241

Keywords: Zone systems Master Class, Blake Rudis, Blend If, Photoshop, Textures, Noise Reduction, Sharpening, Saturation, Layer Styles, Blending Options

Id: tIa_XenL4QU

Length: 18min 58sec (1138 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 24 2015