Blending modes* explained for digital colorists

all right welcome everyone my name is Kurt I am in common blood colorist welcome to my youtube channel so a couple weeks ago I did a video on my favorite blending mode hardlight mode and you guys really liked it a lot and got a lot of good comments on it and I thought well I've never actually done a big video explaining like how I use all these modes and and so that's we're going to talk about in this video today now I want to start off by letting you know what this is not going to be because this isn't going to be like a comprehensive technical explanation of how all these blending modes work what I will do I will link some websites in the description maybe some other videos that go in that kind of detail honestly I didn't find them particularly useful when it comes to practically using these things it's all it's a lot of math and it doesn't do me a lot of good for for coloring so this is going to be how I use these modes there are plenty of ways to do this as I say often on this channel so if you have another way if you have a better way leave a comment let me know and I will do a follow-up or something on this or we could just you know argue in the comments about it so here's where I've done I've set up but this is a panel for money shot drawn by Rebecca Isaacs that's a book I'm working on for vault comics that's from the second issue and I've got a little value scale at the bottom just to show you how these blending modes you know react at different values from light to dark and yeah let's just get started so first off I'm gonna used this this is the shape of the color I'm gonna be using I'm coloring half of the drawings you guys can see how it affects the colors as well as this value scale so the first one is normal now normal mode is not a fancy blending mode whatever color that you pick and put on the screen is what you're going to see so if I pick an orange color and fill this section you're gonna see that exact color and no matter what I do it's gonna always be that exact color I wish that I painted more in this mode and it's a little bit more like working traditionally but I use blending modes all the time it saves a lot of time the next one is dissolve now honestly I don't know if I've ever used this blending mode before because I mean I'm gonna fill this layer with black and you really won't see much difference or any difference at all at a hundred percent opacity but what you will see with dissolve mode if you start playing with the opacity you will see that it is affecting how much of this sort of what do you call this I'm sort of a noise almost effect for me it's just not something that I'm I think I've ever used I can see using this if you wanted to do you know noise on a TV screen or something I'll zoom out really close you guys gonna see this on the video but as you adjust the opacity it is it is showing how much of that is coming through so as the opacity gets higher this effect gets denser so I could see this maybe using this in conjunction with something else to make some noise or snow or something like that dissolve mode is not something that I'm really going to spend a lot of time on because I just really don't use it the next one is a darken this one's kind of interesting and I've used it a couple of times it's not something that I use a lot it is the opposite of lighten in a shocking development I know darken mode in when it's white which which right now this layer is is white it doesn't do anything in white now as you darken it I'm just gonna pull this up and as you darken it you'll see that what happens now you can see this on the value scale and you'll see this in the lighter parts of the image like her eyes and scanner and jacket as I pull this down from white going toward gray you'll see that it starts to affect the lightest part of the image first okay you can see the value scale down they're starting to shift and as I darken it it'll move across the value scale until the whole thing turns black but there's a kind of in-between area where you can see it's only affecting her skin and the jacket because those are the brightest parts of this image and what darken does is it compares the color that you have you know on the on the layer so if I put this in normal just to show you like this is kind of a gray and so in darken mode anything that is lighter than that gray it's starting to blend with that but if it's darker than that gray it leaves it alone okay so it is a the simplest way to put it is whatever color you use in darken mode it's only going to affect the colors that are lighter than that I've used this before like if I if I choose a different color here actually like a blue or something and and fill that I've used this before for kind of wash effects like where I want to shift everything to a certain color and if for some reason there was some brighter color I wanted it to ignore that I would do that but like you can see like this if I swing this through here this this blue that I'm using is affecting just those brighter colors but not her hair and as I darken it then it starts to affect everything else I really used multiply mode we'll get to that in a second let's use what I use if I want to darken something is to use darken mode but I have used or to use multiply mode but I have used darkened for especially playing around with the opacity of it you can kind of lower the intensity of the effect and get some interesting looks out of it darken like I said don't use a ton but it is there for you I'm gonna set this back to white for a second and change it to multiply it's actually the next one now multiply I actually use quite a bit and multiply is very popular it is used often in digital art for shadows because multiply when when it's white its invisible okay so like if I turn this up so right now this section is white and if I change it to multiply it disappears because white and multiply mode is transparent so that in and of itself can be useful and I'll talk about that in a second but you'll notice that as I darken this multiply mode everything immediately starts getting darker okay as I shift into gray and middle and down to dark gray it just gets darker and darker now what that means is no matter what color you pick it's going to darken okay so it's gonna darken the image so if you're going to use multiplying for shadows what a lot of I think beginners assume it's like well it's a shadow I want it to be really dark so I'm gonna pick a dark color and then when you use multiply with a really dark color it gets really dark like too dark most of the time so at least for for art that has black lines like comic book art and you want contrast between your colors and your line art when I say too dark that's what I mean like in this case like this is starting to get a little too dark because it's it's getting close to that black ink color and you don't get a whole lot of contrast that way the way that I use multiply mode for shadows I will typically pick a pretty bright color it kind of goes against your what's the phrase I'm looking for it's it's not intuitive anyway but so if I pick like a really bright blue for example and I put it on this multiply layer like it's still darkens and I've got a little bit of that that blue in there now you can play around with how much of that blue is in there and just how dark it is but I used this a lot when let's say for example and I get this question all the time it's like why do my skin tones look terrible in this scene I'm trying to do at night and I can't find a good skin tone a lot of times at least the way that I work I will kind of wash the whole scene in a color first and that's going to blend and kind of bring your skin tones back to where they should be so like what I mean by that is like right now this skin tone is kind of a middle saturation pinkish color if if I were to let's see if I were to just grab her skin and nothing else and then put a shadow on this okay I'm gonna make it nighttime like just looking at her skin compared to everything else like it doesn't really work like her skin doesn't look like it fits with that shadow side because obviously the shadows are in effect everything so what you can do is use something like multiply mode as kind of a as a new layer of base colors basically you could put this on tall right on top of your base colors and use this as a starting point in the render on top of that you know your lights and shadows and everything like in this original example I actually used multiply mode as you can see it here if I get really close you can actually see that I'm using a slightly different almost like a leaning toward purple it's a little bit warmer blue than the rest of the colors and it's just on her skin and the reason for that is at least in this example if I use the same exact color and I don't put in here real quick just to show you if I fill the rest of that is locked let's unlock that if I fill her skin with that color - like to me it looked a little dead it looked a little gray because we're mixing and orange you know warm skin tone with a really you know cool blue and end up with like a kind of a grey in the middle I didn't just didn't really care for and so I just went into my flats grab that color and then just shifted my shadows a little bit warmer a little bit more purple I don't it was something like this so when you use a multiply layer and you fill it with a color don't hesitate to sort of play around and see if you don't want to use that color on everything because I think it's easy to kind of fall into a trap it's like oh my shadows are this color and they're this color on everything skin is a little more reflective it's a little bit warmer usually because you've got subsurface scattering and you got blood in your skin things and so a lot of colors reflect a little bit warmer than they do on just a you know dead plastic surface or something like or like clothing or something like that and so I do tend to to tint my shadows a little bit warmer and it kind of helps with that all right so the next color on the list is color burn and honestly this is not one that I use I think technically and I was looking at this earlier it it gives you an even darker result than multiply because it gives you more contrast between your base color and your color that you're blending with more saturated mid-tones and reduced highlights so it's just kind of a it's kind of a strange mode to me that does a lot I will say if you're going to use it for coloring comics to just watch just how intense it is and because like for example I'm trying to adjust this to give it some kind of decent looking effect over everything and you can see it's a really bright color I'm having to get too because if you start adding any kind of darkness even like a mid-tone like this starts to get really really intense very very quickly you can see like this is the color that I have picked but you know it's blending with everything making it very very dark so if you have a method that you use that color burn works for let me know in the comments I need to know linear burn is another one I just really don't use if you want a technical definition it decreases the brightness based on the value of the blend color it's also darker to multiply but less saturated in color burn and there's more contrast and darker colors yeah so you know not one that I used again if you use it and have some tips on it feel free to leave a comment darker color is another that I don't use it is similar to darken oh this one doesn't blend it compares the base color and the blend color and it keeps the darkest of the two so so it's kind of similar to darken except there's no blending at all which is kind of a very weird effect so basically like if I pick let me pick like a yellow color you can see that it's only affecting the brightest parts of this image it's only darkening those and there's no blending at all happening at at least 100% opacity it's just pushing that color all the way across now you could get it to blend you know by messing around with the opacity or the fill but again like not something that I not something that I do alright lighten lightens the opposite of darken so with white comes through 100% if you change it all the way to black it goes away because it only lightens the Heraclitus whatever color you use in lighten mode is only going to affect the colors that are actually darker than that if that makes sense again not one that I use very much but you can see here like as I lighten up this black like it starts affecting just the lineart because the line arts black and then the further up you push it the more it's going to impact everything not a mode that I really use I don't think at all a screen mode now screen low is another it's very popular for highlights because screen mode and you know of course it lightens no matter what so for example right now in white of course it comes through 100% blank is completely invisible now I'll talk about highlights first and then talk about how to use it for textures and things so of course let me turn this off for a second and if I select I'm going to select the rendering that I've already done on on this and then just pick pick a color here now I'm on am i where are we on screen mode so as I brush this orange and you can see that it's it's lightening everything up okay the reason that I I've kind of gotten away you screen mode every now and then if I want something to get really bright and like closer to white I will use screen mode but it doesn't let you get very saturated at all you know most of the colors that that I found even if you pick really saturated colors it's not gonna be what comes out you know when you're actually rendering with it so if I back this off and pick like it really like a darker version of this color like these are really dark colors no matter what I put on here it's going to lighten the image a little bit but you just it's tough to get much saturation really intense colors that way why I tend to use hard light more for highlights and shadows and things now again if you want to watch that video go watch the last video on hard light mode but but that's how screen works it lightens no matter what if you pick really bright desaturated colors they're going to be really close to white so to get any sort of intensity to your colors at all you really have to get very very saturated and very dark with screen mode in order to get any sort of kind of color intensity to your highlights there now the other thing to remember about screen mode is that it will make black invisible okay that actually comes in pretty handy quite often so and I'll show you an example so on this book it's a sci-fi book takes place in space and so if I this is a big image hold on this is a NASA Nebula photo and so there's a lot of there's a lot of black on the image so if I just change the blending mode to screen then it gets rid of all the darkest colors on the image and so I use this a lot if I want now obviously if I wanted this to look like space in the background I would have to darken you know the underlying color so that it's it's not coming through like that but but yeah I use this a lot for things like space and stars and nebulas and fire like fires another good one if you find a fire on a black background and you just want to see the fire but not the black background set it screen mode that works pretty well for that all right the next is color dodge and I know this is it kind of goes with color barn it's the opposite of color burn and I know it's a pretty popular blending mode I don't really use it a lot and that's nothing against it it's just to me hard light and screen and some of the others you know kind of do what I need them to do but color dodge is a very intense okay so like you can see in this like and it always brightens is kind of like screen does but even picking like this Reed dark gray color you can see how much it's it's brightening this image and so it doesn't take a whole lot of brightness to just really kind of blow things out and and kind of over expose everything so if you're gonna use it I would recommend using it at really low opacities and then you can play around of course with how these colors blend together okay you can kind of see how it's affecting all these colors here it's just a very very intense lighting but I don't really use a whole lot if you're going to low opacities and you should be fine unless you're going for a very intense effect if that's the case all right linear dodge and AD mode now this is a mode that I use a lot and it also it can get pretty intense pretty quickly but as long as you're using it like if I'm rendering with it I will usually render at like no more than like 20 to 30 40 50 percent opacity if I want you know subtle changes now if you want really bright really intense lights then of course you can you know up the opacity on that or use a really bright color really saturated color I will sometimes use this or screen mode depending on the look I'm going for like if I wanted to like you know make it look like she's standing next to the Sun or something like it's a super intense very very bright situation I will sometimes put a linear dodge mode or a layer or a screen mode layer and just and you know make it really really bright and make it really really saturated and it gives you a really really strong effect on all the colors you can render with it like I said just again understand the results gonna be pretty intense unless the opacity is in the other pressure using on your brush is pretty low alright lighter color is just the opposite of darker color it doesn't do any blending it just replaces the darker color with with it if that makes sense so like for example as I push the brightness of this up it's starting to fill in the black first and then it'll start getting into the hair which is the next brightest thing and then the skin thing else feels in so um unless you're going for something like a really specific effect like it's nice not something I use very much of course you could also play around with the opacity on that layer and and that will also give you a different effect but it's not one I use very much all right so the next one is overlay now overlay is interesting sort of like hard light because it will act like screen or multiply depending on basically how bright of a color you're using and you know what color is underneath it the way that I like to use overlay is and I think 50% gray is invisible yeah it is so 50% gray overlay is invisible and then you can see what white and what what black does but what I like to use it for is the sort of there's things that I want to just tint a little bit with a certain color like for example if I turn on all my rendering on on this and this is what the final image for this look like and let's say that I wanted to add a little bit of warmth into these areas where these transitions are you know some of that you know subsurface scattering effect that kind of blood effect or whatever I will like I let's make a new overlay layer here and then I'll start by picking kind of that mid-tone color as seen because I kind of see where to start and will just kind of lean that toward a little bit more saturation and maybe add some warmth to it and then I go along this edge and you can see that it's it doesn't really affect the darker areas that much and it doesn't really affect the lighter areas that much you know so as I brush over this section you can see that it's it's not impacting these bright areas quite as much as it is the the mid-tones and it won't really affect the dark areas as much so will the mid-tones so for things like you know this into this warmth in between the transitions on skin I like multiply are like overlay a lot that and it's also my go-to anytime I just generally have like a a skin tone that I think looks a little too dead I will make an overlay layer and and start to warm that up a little bit and this is a pretty intense effect but I'm just trying to show you guys an example you can always you know play around the opacity of it if you do something that is you know too intense or you know shift the color more toward gray and the closer you get to gray you know the less it's going to affect your colors underneath alright and the next one is soft light now to me salt you can see the difference they bounce back and forth between overlay and soft light I found it that soft lights just kind of a light overlay mode I think the math is very similar personally I just don't use it that much because I can either get what I want out of hard light or just lower the opacity and and I'm kind of stick with what I know but soft light is also good for kind of bathing a scene and in a certain color like if you want to if I make a new layer on top of this and set it to soft light mode and then just don't pick like a middle greenish color here there we go you can see that it just sort of subtly tends everything with that color but it tends to affect the mid-tones more than anything else which is a lot of times what you want because you don't want it you don't always want it affecting everything unless that's what you're going for but you can see as I darken this you can really see the effect here as I start to darken it it's really almost avoiding changing the bright colors very much you know and the darker I get it's even more obvious that it's really only affecting those mid-tones and kind of darker colors where I am so it's it's an excellent mode to you know if you kind of want to shift things into a certain you know color scheme or a certain kind of a wash it's excellent for that and it does a better job of avoiding you know completely changing everything like like some of the other color modes we'll get to in a little bit like I think hard light actually yeah it kind of equally affects everything you know so if I go too hard light which is I think the very next one and I talked about this in the last video but it will equally kind of darken everything or brighten everything in the middle it will kind of shift everything that's kind of the difference the main difference between that and soft light it kind of depends on your method of working as to forage which one of those you would want to do what I tend to do lately is and what I did on this original image if I turn all this rendering off I will show you so like here's just the inks and basically the base colors I used a hard light layer in this sort of blue purpley color to kind of shift all of this a little bit cooler you know kind of a little bit toward that purple and that basically became my base colors and everything on top of that if it's on top of the layer it's not going to affect it so you can use a soft light would be something I would use maybe at the end like let's say that I've colored everything and but I don't want it I want I don't want a strong and in effect as hard light wood like this let's say I just want it in those mid tones and I want to keep my highlights then use something like soft light and again you can always play around with the opacity to determine you know how much that effect you want it's a great way to kind of unify your colors you know I know I talked quite a bit on this channel about using too many colors and so if you have a piece and it just looks like a fruit salad you know use something like soft light to you know adjust and kind of rein all those colors and a little bit it should bring them to get a little bit more and don't forget in all of these cases you know I'm just putting in a for time sake putting in one big color of everything but you could put a mask on this and you know paint this out of the areas you don't want it like you know if I don't want it on her eyes for some reason I could just paint with black on a mask and it goes away so keep that in mind all right the next is hard light I'm honestly not going to spend any time on this because if you're interested in what our light mode does go watch the last video I did it an entire I don't know five or six things that it does that I really like a lot I will say this about hard light though and I left last video I thought I'd listed everything I like to use hard light for textures sometimes and I'll show you guys what I mean all right so I opened up a this is a texture and I can't remember I've got some textures that I took some pictures on that was cardboard and I've got textures other people in getting me and I don't know where this one came from but you can see has kind of got a subtle kind of you know like cardboard kind of texture or something on it if I copy this and put it on top of my image here and I now because this color the color of this texture is pretty close to grey it's pretty close to that 50% middle gray if I change this to hard light mode it will get rid of all of the middle gray in the texture and leave behind just the lightest in darkest parts of it now of course this doesn't look great but but you could play around with the opacity of this you could you know open up a levels adjustment and make you know changes to how the texture looks but I use hard light for that sometimes especially on any textures that are kind of close to a middle gray it does a good job of you know letting some of the detail the texture come through without impacting the colors you know in a really heavy way and you could use hard light or soft light some of those others but that's the only thing that I didn't mention I think in that last video in hard light mode that I sometimes use it for alright the next one is vivid light this is another mode that is just super intense like at 50% gray I think it's invisible let me make sure yes all right so zero percent or actually 50% gray vivid light mode you don't even see it at all if I darken it just a little even a little it gets really intense really quickly darkens it will also lighten depending on you know which color you pick personally I just don't really use this I think I've like tripped over this mode before you know kind of playing around with opacities and and and trying to find tricks to you know you know make a special effect or something but it's been so few and far between I honestly really just never use this mode so we're gonna move on to the next one which is linear light which is another mode I really don't use very much if you have ideas about ways to use these then of course let me know in the comments we're kind of getting into the strange blending modes or at least they're strange to me pin light hard mix these are very intense modes that do crazy things hard mix is sort of like like a posterized sort of effect I guess you could say again if you're doing art that looks like this then of course have at it have a blast it's a weird mode kind of trippy but yeah for me not something I really use very much the next one is difference and I think difference is it's sort of like like an inverse or negative of the car that it's showing again I'm not looking I spent a lot of time here because I don't really use this mode I think you know I've used this again maybe for a strange special effect everything every now and then but what I would recommend if you're curious about how some of these weird ones worked if I'm not spending a lot of time on is just fill the layer with the color and start shifting it around and see what it does you know to the colors underneath and because I really don't know what any of this stuff does alright then we've got subtract which is I'm sure the opposite of add if I had to guess subtract looks at color information in each Channel and subtracts the blend color from the base color negative values for clipped to zero again like I just don't use subtract feel free to play around with it let's see divide yeah this is this is well this is par the reason why I did this video this is the Adobe definition for divide looks at the color information in each channel and divides the blend color from the base color divided divides okay thank you Adobe I need to look up I think pics imperfect I'll link his channel below he's way smarter than me on this stuff I think he's got a video on divide I haven't watched yet but I need to so we'll figure it out together all right and there's only a couple of them left Hugh I don't really use you that much but I want to see what it does creates a result color with the brightness and saturation of your base color and the hue of the Blin color what's interesting about hue is when you use it on top another color it says it creates the result color from the brightness and saturation of your base color and the hue of the blink color so if I pick like a a red hue and put it on this it's keeping the saturation levels the same as what's underneath and it's keeping the brightness the same as what's underneath so again kind of one of those unique look sort of layers that layer modes that I could see using you know for you know maybe a flashback or if I just want a an interesting you know very specific case then maybe I would use something like this but it's not something that that I have ever really spent a whole lot of time using saturation is another one that I have really not found an excellent use case for myself it's similar to hue it sent it keeps the limit that the brightness of the or the luminance as it calls it and the hue but use it the saturation on the layer that you pick so again kind of a weird layer mode that I don't use color mode I use quite often that's the next one or color mode will keep the same brightness of what's underneath it but it will shift the color to whatever's on the layer above it that we're using here so like in this case yeah so this one's unique because it lets the hue and saturation of the blend color come through but the brightness of the colors underneath so so yeah basically this is a good mode for when you want your values that you've established to to be intact but you want to have it all blend with with you know as all one kind of monochrome color I've used this before plenty of times for you know if she was you know in a in a lab with all orange and red colored or something like my you know be a mode that makes sense or you know for nighttime you know if you want to really monochrome limited palette like you can use color modes for that color modes are also excellent for colorizing black and white drawing so for example let's see let's hide this for a second and let's pretend that this is a black and white drawing for a second I'm just gonna make I use a black and white filter for that so let's say that I was wanting to color a black and white drawing and this is what it looks like I can make a new layer on top I can set the mode to color and whatever color I pick is what's going to you know so what's going to come through now this can be a confusing mode to work in because your values need to be right you know you can't really fix bad values with a color layer because there's not going to darken and it's not going to light and it's only going to shift the color itself so if you're going to use this to colorize and drawing just make sure your values where you want to be I had a student email me recently because they said like no matter what I do I'm trying to use this color layer but it won't it won't get dark enough well it means your values underneath aren't dark enough you know so using coloring in color mode on top of black and white line art can actually be a good exercise to figure out you know your if your values are any good or not basically and then last one and again not really going spend a lot of time here because it's not one that I really use but luminosity is it basically is the I think it's the opposite of code mode yeah it's the opposite of color mode so it creates a result color with the hue and saturation the base color but the brightness of your blend color so again not one that I really use because it gives you very strange results to me and so of course there are lots of reasons to use luminosity and I've seen photographers and photo editors and things talk about the luminosity masks and things like that but again for me for coloring it's just not something that I really have much use for alright so for what it's worth that's what I think about blending modes thank you so much for watching if you have questions feel free to leave them in the comments and I'll be sure to put some smarter people descriptions of these modes in the description as well if you want a more in-depth on any particular mode there are definitely better explanations this is really more of like practically how I use these modes and how colorist can use in different ways but of course there's a million ways to use all this stuff thanks to everyone that makes this channel possible I'm gonna start crediting patrons at the end of the videos so if that's something interested in be sure to check the links in the description as always subscribe like bell everything see you guys in the next one take care

Channel: Color with Kurt

Views: 45,856

Keywords: photoshop coloring techniques, tutorials for beginners, coloring line art in photoshop, digital coloring, comic book coloring 101, how to color comics with photoshop, BLENDING MODES, BLENDING MODES EXPLAINED, procreate, krita

Id: ZIUkInR2RcU

Length: 35min 54sec (2154 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 30 2020