Difference Blend Mode in Photoshop

hello Blake grutas here with f/64 cabine f/64 elite and today we're gonna be talking about the difference blend mode it's a really powerful blend mode used for both image alignment and of all things color grading so I'll show you image alignment cuz that's typically what you're used to but watch what happens when we start using the difference blend mode for color grading here's one effect here's another effect here's another effect now watch this tutorial and at the very end of it please download the actions I want you to take advantage of them alright let's hop in I'll talk all about the difference blend mode so I want to take the time to talk about the difference blend mode now there's two ways that I use a difference blend mode I'm gonna show you those two ways here and at the very end of this whole tutorial when it give you some actions that make it all easy for you okay because this step is not very simple to wrap your head around it's very complex the difference blend mode typically the way I use it is for one of two ways either to make sure that Photoshop aligned the pixels of my image correctly or to to color great so it's first before we get into that let's talk about the difference blend mode and what does it do okay so difference it looks at the color information in each Channel and subtracts either the blend color from the base color or the base color from the blend color depending on which has the greater brightness value blending with white inverts the base color values blending with black produces no change I don't know about you but I know me if I read that I'm like what and heck are you talking about I can read these things and I can get a basic understanding about what's happening here you see something with some inversions I see something about blending with black creates black and subtracting pixels from each other but that's about all I gather from this it's very difficult for me to read these things that I see on the help X Adobe blog or anywhere for that matter and try to put it into practical application so what I do is pattern repetition and pattern recognization once you see patterns repeat themselves you can always reproduce this process it's very cool so let's hop in so typically what I would do with the difference blend mode in the image like this is let's say I had two images I was stacking on top of each other to try and blend them together well I've got a copy of this back if I change this one on top to the difference blend mode look what happens everything turns black why is that well that's because every single pixel on this image is either being subtracted or added and the resulting inverted color whatever blahblah difference below does okay what I'm seeing here is that as the pixels are stacked on top of each other if they're the exact same color they subtract each other out and if you have a pixel value of 127 on top of pixel value of 127 with that 127 set to the difference blend mode it's now subtracting them from one another and now we get black because zero would be black if I press V for the move tool just move this up right here real quick now you can see that there's a little slight difference right well what's happening is some of these colors are still the same and others are different so as you're moving this around Photoshop is adding and subtracting all of those pixels to give you the resulting inverted color underneath right because that's what difference does so if everything's lined up perfectly we shouldn't see any edges around each other like this if you look right here this isn't aligned very well if we turn this off turn this on we can move this over right until we get it exactly where we want it to be until those layers are aligned the difference blend mode is a great way to align layers because it subtracts those pixels from one another until you get a right spot on this is great when you're doing anything like focus stacking or if you're doing panorama building or maybe some HDR or maybe some exposure blending whatever that might be where you're stacking a layer on top of another layer and they're pretty much the exact same thing or very close to you can use the difference blend mode if it turns black then you know you got good alignment if it's even slightly off then you know you don't have good in alignment that was just me nudging it up once nudging it down once nudging it down I didn't laughs nudging it right with the arrow keys okay so that's the the typical way that you would see me use a difference blend mode in the past that's pretty much all I did with the difference blend mode well now I've come up with a different way to use the different difference blend mode specifically with color grading which is really quite an awesome experience so the only way to really wrap your head around this is to actually just add a solid color fill to the the canvas and again the actions that I provided for you will do all of this for you but I'm not showing you till the end because I want you to understand okay so we turn solid color Phil on and I'm just gonna change this to a very pure form of color let's just make this a pure form of blue okay press okay now if I go down here to the difference blend mode on this solid color fill layer look what's happening so what we see when we do this is a great color grading experience okay we had the solid color fill layer of blue on top of our image but when we change that to the difference blend mode what it does is it takes that blue and it applies itself to the black areas and transitions over to yellow why yellow well yellow is the complement of blue on the color wheel so what you're essentially doing here is your color grading with one color and using its complement on the other side of your between your mid-tones and your highlights and your shadows so the color will apply itself to the shadows and then transition over to the highlight areas and as it transitions over its going to bring its complement over to the other side because there's that inversion that happens with the difference blend mode now if we were to do something like this like change the color to let's say red look at the difference now red is now applying itself to the darkest dark areas transitioning through the mid-tones and giving us a nice transition into its complement in the white areas of the photograph the thing that you need to know about the difference blend mode here is that opacity is only going to really change the intensity of how it applies itself to the image where Phil is going to change the calculation of all that subtraction and an adding that's happening with those pixels so watch this as we drop the Phil down you'll start to see that the red starts to transition out of the mid-tones and more towards those darker areas rather quickly until we get to about you know at 30% we're basically saying red is only applying itself now to those shadow areas and it's very slowly transitioning into a cyan of color but not the full potential of cyan now over here on the whites look at the before full potential of cyan full potential of red here we get a deeper red and a lighter or brighter version of the color cyan so yes we are using the color red to do this but think about things in terms of opposites and how they work here if we change this back to something like blue watch how it transitions into yellow so how do we think about this when it comes to color grading well let's pull up an image here and use this photograph it's a really good photograph to work on because it's got a lot of lights and darks with very minimal color in it so if we were to go to a solid color film and apply the solid color of blue and use the difference blend mode it's not gonna look good alright folks don't don't look at this and say this is how Blake said the color grade because that's not what I said if we drop the calculation or the fill we're gonna see how much less that blue applies itself to the shadows and how much more the yellow transitions into the highlights but watch as that happens here here we have a pure form of yellow in those highlight areas as we start to transition this down we actually start to get a really nice looking color grade that we could work with here so with this set to blue we're seeing a lot of blue in those shadow areas just here in the peaks of these rocks I'll zoom in so you can see that and then the rest of it transitions into a yellow outside the image so really what we're doing here is we're using blue to do a yellow color grade huh interesting that's because of the opposite color wheel if we were to double click on this and we were to go into the yellows now look at that we're using yellow to color great with blue on the photograph because of the rules of complementary colors so I don't want you to focus necessarily on what solid color fill you pick for this I want you to pick a solid colorful that you like and then go ahead and just move this slider up and down to see the color that you want to color grade your image with even some of this sine is beautiful because it's actually color grading with red so I'll press okay if we drop the opacity of this we're reducing the intensity of the difference that's happening there so the fill is the calculation of where it's applying itself to the image and opacity is the intensity of that calculation how it applies itself to the photo there is no before there's the after but if you want to experiment this now that we got the sent to about 40% opacity here we'll just call this 40% and 20% fill if we double-click on this we can move this around and just start to manipulate that color in such a beautiful beautiful way I mean look at that I mean we're talking about really controlling the emotion of the viewer now in a very subtle way and why I like this you would say well why don't I just use a solid color fill set to the color blend mode well why I like this is because as it applies that color to the image to pull that color into us it's also using the inverse relationships of that color - naturally color great either those highlight or shadow areas with our color so watch this we just bring this all the way up here and bring this all the way up here okay so that would be the intensity of this same photos all the way up at the top that was with a pure form of color but watch what happens as we move to something like the mid-tones that's a totally different color grade than what we saw up here because the intensity of those Reds is much less and it's now more into maybe a sepia tone and this would be a beautiful color grade for the image if we went with something like this and use this color instead all the calculations in a different blend mode and how it applies itself to the image are changing based on the colors that we're telling it to add subtract multiply divide or do whatever the heck the difference blend mode does okay so we'll just drop this fill down and look at that I told you it's less about knowing exactly how every single pixel is gonna subtract itself from another pixel and it's more about repeated patterns I know that by looking at this and repeating this pattern several times that I can get a really decent color grade just by dropping that fill and dropping that opacity look at that look at the mood that's brought in with this image and you know of course you don't always have to be subject to just using the solid color fill with opacity and fill you can also double click inside here and use any of those blended principles that we've talked about throughout the course of these videos if you just drop this down look at that and very beautiful transition of a color grade there that just finishes off that image so well if you double click this experiment with different colors I like where this cyan is heading but look at what happens if we change this to red and really pull in that cyan or we change this to scientists start pulling in those Reds because again the opposite color on the color wheel of cyan is going to be red all right so you have to you really have to think in terms of the color wheel here because if you try to apply green to this and say why isn't this color grading green you're not taking into account the fact that there's the inversion process that's going to happen with those colors when we choose something like green so we choose green we're actually using magenta that's just how difference works look at the other areas in the colors that we can select here though well bring this fill back up to a hundred percent and bring the opacity 100% still this set to the difference blend mode if we double click inside this solid color fill and see what happens we go more towards the lights look at the difference now there's a big portion of that blue area that's applying itself to those shadow areas if we come down here now it's less about that complement that's happening in the sky and more about the blue that's applying itself to the image so here we have a big difference between just what's happening right here on the colors and what's happening here and why doesn't it change much with this well it did say that if we blend with black there will be no change right so if we blend with a color that is a high value of black in it the area that the highlight areas will not receive quite as much of an adjustment but the shadows will all right this is where we start controlling things based on patterns this is for shadows this would be for highlights this would be for a mild adjustment and this would be a very strong pure color adjustment we got a nice color grade on highlights here we get a very nice one on our shadows here's more of a mild mix between both and here's pure color so where does that come in well I've made a series of actions for you here if we go to the difference blend mode with Blake Curtis if I press play on the difference light it's going to be a very mild version of a color grade because it's a it's not gonna be affecting too much of your highlights just really your shadow areas if you adjust this it's already set don't move this okay this will move based on the actions that you set down here but you move your color to get your color grade in those shadow areas where you want it that's a very nice subtle color grade with the difference blend mode here we go with mild it's gonna be a little bit more intense but here you get to choose your color and you can always drop your opacity from here they start pretty high but that's so that you can tailor in exactly what you need for the image that you're working on look at that difference man it's beautiful if we go to pure again that's gonna be your pure color selection whether that's a pure color selection for Reds or sans or magenta whatever you think your cut your image needs let's talk about how do you know what your image means well think about color and color theory and what colors are going to control or manipulate the viewer into feeling something okay cold em cold colors will make them feel colder warm colors make them feel warm or they will make them all feel happier blue will be sadder okay so when we think about that here we feel a lot more sad and down in the in the in the dredges of life whereas here it's a little bit more uplifting it's a little bit more positive all right right there about right there be nice positive sunset something like that obviously the image has some mood to it too so you pick the colors based on the mood that you want to set for your image so you'll notice that what happens is after you press play on any one of these it's automatically gonna pop up with the solid color picker here why is that that's because I want you to pick the color I start out with this tsiyon color because I love the way it adds the color grade with the difference blend mode but I want you to be able to go through here and change the color to whatever you want okay and then if you do this last one this difference in the rich shadow areas it's going to produce some very very rich shadows in your photo to really make those shadows deep and dark if you're already working on a deep and dark photo like this they're gonna be really dark but if you're working on a mildly dark photo they'll pull in those shadows in a beautiful way now this isn't just the end-all-be-all okay what I wear I use this type of color grading as towards the end of a photo to me this photo is done and complete and is ready to go into artistic processing so what do i navigate with artistic processing that's where I go into things like palette effects which is one of my panels that I've built that helps build the color grade for the image okay that's another place where I would use these difference blend modes so I've got my image good it's technically great with tone and color I'm ready to move into the artistic realm that's when I start using these difference blend modes or any of these color grades does this mean that this blend mode color grade is better than any other one no I'm just giving you an option and an alter so please please please please download these actions take advantage of that we covered a lot here and I know these actions are gonna help the basic idea behind the difference blend mode is we can use it to align our layers so that if we have an image that looks relatively the same maybe it's an HDR bracketed series or something that we're gonna expose your blend we want to make sure that everything lines up perfectly we can use a difference blend mode and where we have perfect alignment is where things start to turn solid black and you can definitely see the edges of your image that's a great use for a difference blend mode the second one is going to be right here with color grading and we showed that in a very unique way using the color wheel and the opposites on the color on how it's going to apply itself to your image just know that if you use the color cyan the typical color grade that you're gonna get on the other end is going to be something like red because of those complements so focus less on the color that you're using in the beginning to pick it and focus more on what you want that to change to as you move that slider up and down so why is this better than other ones well as you saw here while it applies the color grade to may be the highlights or the shadows it's applying its inverted complement to the other areas which brings harmony into the image it's a great use for color grading in a photo and probably something you haven't really seen the big kicker the difference blend mode is controlled by fill fills the calculation opacity is the intensity of that calculation again my name is Blake Rudess thank you so much for taking the time to watch this and fill your brain with some new insight on an awesome blend mode that would otherwise be trash all right you guys have a great one [Music]

Channel: f64 Academy

Views: 30,219

Keywords: Blake Rudis, f64 academy, f.64, How To, Tutorial, Photoshop, Adobe, Difference Blend Mode, Difference Color Grade, Blend Mode

Id: nbSJEIvEc8g

Length: 17min 25sec (1045 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 29 2018