GIMP 2.10 Tutorial: All Layer Modes Explained

[Music] [Music] hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by Davies media design my name is Michael Davies and in today's tutorial I'll be going over a comprehensive look at all of the layer modes found in so there are currently 38 layer modes found in the latest version of 12 of these layer modes were added with Jim 2.10 so if you're using a version that's older than 2.10 you won't have access to these layer modes and I will of course be going through all of these layer modes found in in today's tutorial I also have another tutorial on my channel that goes over an introduction to layers as well as some advanced layer concepts so if you're not familiar with layers and the layers concept in which is a very important concept for I recommend you check out that tutorial first before you watch this tutorial so before we dive into this tutorial I want to direct you guys over to my website at Davies media design.com as always we have tons of video and text tutorials on here so definitely check that out you can also enroll in our best-selling photo editing course from beginner to pro photo retoucher on udemy you can also support our channel and help us grow by becoming a patron on patreon and you'll get some awesome extras in return and I'll include a link to this as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video so I'll be using a few photos for today's tutorial I'll also be linking these in the description of the video and you can download all of these from pixabay as per usual so when you're working with layer modes you're typically working with two layers or you're working with a tool within so layer modes do work with layers or tools in but think of the top layer as the blend layer it's also called the active layer and the mask layer so the top layer is instrumental in how the layer mode causes the two layers to interact with one another although in some cases in what is called a commutator of layer mode the order of the layer modes doesn't matter so the top and the bottom have the same significance the bottom layer is typically known as the base layer or the image layer and this layer is typically where the final result of the layer mode interaction between the two layers is going to reside so from a technical standpoint layer modes work because pixels are assigned a value every single pixel in each layer within are assigned a value and those values then when using the layer mode are plugged into an equation so you have the pixel value from your top image and your pixel value from your bottom image both of those are plugged into some sort of equation that produces a new pixel value and that new pixel value is then displayed on the blended layer so the final result basically is displaying the pixel value created from plugging those two numbers into the equation pixel values in are between 0 and 255 0 being black and 255 being white so typically when the pixel value is closer to 0 it's a darker pixel when it's closer to 255 it is a lighter pixel and when you're plugging these numbers into the formulas if the pixel value that comes out is a negative value so let's say it comes out as negative 5 that pixel will typically be displayed as a black pixel unless the formula states otherwise the same applies to the white pixels so if a value exceeds 255 that pixel is typically displayed as a pure white pixel unless again it is specified in the formula that it's to be displayed as something else so another way to visualize how layer modes work from a technical standpoint and this might just be confusing you guys but it is good to know the technical side of things pixels on a top layer and a bottom layer have a location and typically in these layer mode formulas the pixels that are being combined are the two pixels one in the top layer one in the bottom layer that are both in the exact same location in their respective layers so basically the pixel values from the same locations are always being added into the formula from the top layer and the bottom layer if none of this is making sense to you by the way don't worry I'm going to explain all of these concepts in a lot simpler terms as we get through this tutorial so let's dive into our now and layer modes can be found up here in the layers panel if you don't have your layers panel open you can go to windows recently close Docs and they'll be right here or if it's not there you can go to doc bold dialogues and right here you have your layers panel so again right here at the very top of your layers panel you have your layer modes and the default is going to be set to normal you also actually have layer modes in some of your tools in so right now I have one of my paint tools which is the gradient tool open and you'll see I have a layer mode here so this allows you to just apply a layer mode to the tool as you're using it versus waiting to apply it to the entire layer so this is obviously helpful if you just want the layer mode applied to the tool and not the entire layer although if that's the case I do typically recommend just painting with your paint tool on an entirely separate layer so pretty much all of the paint tools within are gonna have the layer modes but I'm mostly gonna go over the layer modes within just the layers panel for this tutorial as that is the most common use and that's the most common way to explain how layer modes work you can combine layer modes with the opacity slider here to compound effects and produce different results as well as use them with layer masks and layer group masks to also achieve different results and we'll get into some of that a little bit later in this tutorial so clicking on the layer mode drop down you'll see here are all 38 layer modes there's actually seven different layer mode types at least that I know of so you have normal lighten darken contrast inversion cancellation and component and for the most part these different layer mode types are separated by a line here and of course I'll go into what each of these different layer modes does and that's going to help simplify what those layer mode types actually are so I'll close this layer mode drop down temporarily so right now I only have one image within my composition and as I mentioned at the beginning of this tutorial layer modes typically are an interaction that takes place between multiple layers so what I'm gonna do is bring in another layer here so I've got another image right here and all I have to do is click and drag this tab and then drag over this tab here drag over my composition and then release and now I have two different layers and for simplicity I'm gonna name this the top layer and this is the bottom layer so I'm gonna start with the normal layer mode which is what this is set to by default all this means is that the layer on top covers the layer on the bottom so as you can see when I clicked and dragged this image into our composition it created a new layer and I put it at the top and it covered up our bottom layer so I can show or hide this layer and now you can see the bottom layer below so all the normal layer mode setting does is it basically doesn't affect this layer at all and it causes the layer stacking order which means the order in which these layers are stacked on top of one another is going to favor the very top image so it's only going to display the top image first and then if you do anything to this top layer like decrease the opacity then it'll start to display the layers below or if the layer above is smaller than the layer below or has any sort of transparency then you can see the layer below in the stacking order but just for the sake of simplicity if the two layers are the same size like in this case when you have this set to normal this is going to cover the bottom layer so that's pretty simple I'll move on to the dissolve layer mode so I'll click on here and go to the next one dissolve so right now that doesn't do anything and the reason is that this layer mode dissolves the upper layer into the lower layer via a random pattern of pixels drawn in areas of partial transparency so right now there is no transparency here and that's why we don't see any effect but if I do something like grab my eraser tool and I have this set to a pretty soft brush here and here's the hardness it's set to 25 so this is a pretty soft brush and let me just increase the size of this brush as well maybe a little bit more so because this is a soft brush it's creating partial transparency so if I set this to normal you'll see usually this is causing the image to fade into the image beneath it so this transparency is fading it's zero transparency here a hundred percent here and then it's fading right here where I use the eraser or around the edges of my eraser so when I set this to dissolve you'll see that partial transparency is converted into this pixelated look and you can get a better look at this if I hold ctrl and zoom in with the mouse wheel so here you'll see that there's a bunch of pixels here and you'll notice that none of these pixels have a smooth edge they all have hard edges and the reason for that is that this layer mode does not have an tile icing an tile icing is in effect within that smooths rounded edges so it smoothes pixels to make rounded edges look smoother and in this case it doesn't do that so all these pixels are square so it just creates this look like this photo is dissolving into the next photo and that in a nutshell is the dissolve layer mode so hit control Z to backup - before we use that eraser and use my mouse wheel to zoom out the next layer mode is color erase so let me actually just switch over to my move tool and I'll come over here to mode and I'm gonna change this to color erase so basically all this does is it takes the colors from the top layer and it erases those same colors from the bottom layer in this case we have a lot of different colors because we have two images so it's kind of hard to tell what exactly this layer mode is doing but let me change this top layer mode back to normal and let me grab my foreground color here grab my color picker tool and I'm gonna just select a color from this image so let's go with the color from her lips here so this sort of pinkish color and I'll click OK and if I create a new layer and I'll just name this color fill it with transparency and set the layer mode here to color erase and click OK right now nothing will happen because we don't have a color on this layer but if I grab my bucket fill tool and I paint this color on here it's gonna erase all instances of that pinkish color so now all of that color is gone from here if I hit control Z I can also do this with the paintbrush so let's say I take a paint brush I'll decrease the size and I'm going to paint on this layer just where the lips are you'll see now the color in the lips that we selected with our color picker tool has been erased so that's what the color erase layer mode does so I'll hit control Z so that was the color race mode used on a layer if I delete this layer here I can actually use the color erase just with the paintbrush tool by itself so I'll change the mode to color erase and instead of the paintbrush painting this color on our composition now it'll erase that color from our layer here so I'll hit control Z by the way that layer mode type is a cancellation layer mode because it does cancel out colors within the layer the last two layer modes that we went through including the normal and the dissolve layer modes are both considered normal layer modes so the next layer mode is going to be erase and what this does is it just erases pixels from the top layer from the bottom layer so if I set this to erase it's going to erase everything within the bottom layer because there's the same number of pixels in the top layer as the bottom so I'll come over here and choose a race and you'll see that the left is transparency let me hit ctrl Z if I hide this layer create a new layer and I'm gonna set this mode to erase and I'll fill it with transparency click OK nothing will happen right now because there's no pixels on here let me change the mode of my paintbrush back to normal so now if I paint any pixels on my color layer which is set to the erase mode it's going to erase any of those pixels that I draw from that bottom layer so you'll see as I paint on here it's basically acting like an eraser and just erasing those pixels so that is also a cancellation layer type and one thing to note here I'm gonna delete this layer and unhide this top layer if I use this layer mode the erase layer mode with the layer mask it'll actually invert what's going on with the layer mask so remember layer masks are a non-destructive way to delete pixels from an image they add transparency to the image using black and white I'm gonna go through that in a second but because layer masks do work with transparency which is an erasing property when you add this erase layer mode to that it's just going to invert it because basically the layer mask is already erasing things so basically it's like creating a double negative here and it's going to invert whatever is happening on the layer mask I'm going to come over to my top layer right click and go to add layer mask and under initialize layer mask - I'm gonna choose white full opacity and make sure my invert mask option is unchecked and I'll click Add so usually white on a layer mask would totally reveal the image but in this case you'll see that when we add white to this layer it hasn't done anything and now what I'm gonna do is paint black on the layer mask that usually adds transparency to the layer where you have the layer mask on but in this case it's actually going to reveal pixels so let me just demonstrate that real quick so grab my paintbrush and I'm just gonna paint on my layer mask and you'll see it's actually going to reveal the pixels of the bottom layer so let me come over here right-click and delete this layer mask and then change the mode here back to normal so from my next layer mode I'm gonna come over here to my other image and here we have two images that are actually from my how to blend two images together tutorial and what I've done is I basically created them so that they're still blending into one another but there's just this little gap between the two of them so there's some missing pixels here and this is all from one image so these are two parts to one whole image one part of the image is the winter image and that's on the top the other part is the mountains image and that's on the bottom so I want to merge these two together I don't want there to be any pixels missing in the middle so if I come up to the top layer and I change this layer mode to merge you'll see this has gone ahead and merged these two photos together and it's also filled in the missing pixels here and now the two parts of the image have become a single whole image if you wanted to actually merge these two layers together and just create one single layer from it you can right click on here and go to merge down and that'll merge your two layers together now and it's become one image and it's become one whole image I'll hit control Z and just back up so the next layer mode is called split and that just subtracts the top layer from the bottom layer and so let me just demonstrate by coming over here to the layer mode and I'll change this to split and so now you'll see that top layer has disappeared so in my opinion this layer mode is almost exactly the same as the erase layer mode I'm gonna change this back to normal so next we're gonna get into the light and layer mode types and this does exactly what it sounds like it's going to create a lighter image between your two layers that you're using so the first layer mode I'm going to use is the light and layer mode I'm gonna come back over here to our original two layers that we've been working with and I'll come over here to mode and change this to light and only what this does is it keeps the lighter pixel values between the top and the bottom layers so looking at this image after we've applied the layer mode you'll see that it kind of creates this spliced composition and the reason that looks like this is because it's taken the lighter pixels located throughout the image and it's only kept that pixel between the two so remember both the top and bottom layers both have their own pixel values so there are two pixels assigned to the same location when stacked on top of each other like this and what this layer mode does is it only keeps the one pixel in that single location that is the lighter of the two pixels and so that's why in some cases you've got some pixels from the top image like the girls face so this part of the girls face was brighter because of the light that was hitting her face and the wall same thing the pixels in this wall were lighter than the pixels below so if we hide this layer you'll see the pixels in this lower layer are still pretty bright but they're not quite as bright as this wall right here on the other hand her I right here is brighter than the girl on tops hair so if I hide that bottom layer you'll see the hair pixels are pretty dark whereas these pixels all right here are pretty light so it only kept the lighter pixels right here if I were to perform this with an all-black layer so let me create a new layer I'll set the mode here to lighten only and I'm gonna fill this with my foreground color which right now is set to black and I'll click OK and then let me come over here to this layer and change this to normal so because every pixel in this layer is dark they're all pure black basically it's just going to cause this entire layer to disappear when we use the light and only mode on here now on the other hand if I change this color to white and I fill this with all white what's gonna show up is pure white because pure white is the lightest pixel you can have in so I'll just fill this with white and now you'll see that with the layer mode set to light and only the only thing that shows up is the pure white layer so I'll just exit out of that light and only is actually our first commutator player and that means that when I add lighting only to this top layer and light and only to this bottom layer here it actually doesn't matter which layer is the top layer it's going to produce the same result anyway so if I move this to the top you'll see nothing has changed about this if I move this back up to the top you'll see again nothing has changed so as long as both of these have the layer mode set to light and only it doesn't actually matter which one is on top but if I change this one to normal you'll see there's no change here but if I move this to the top you'll see that now that's disappeared so both of these have to have the layer mode set to light and only in order for the commutator principle to work and again commutator just meaning that the order of the layers doesn't matter so let me change this back to light and only so that both layers have the light and only layer mode selected so again no change here and let me now actually switch this to a layer mode that is not commutative just for demonstration purposes I'm gonna switch this to dodge so both of these will be set to dodge now if I switch the order of the layers you'll see the final result is slightly different and so that's why the dodge layer mode is not commutative I'm gonna get more into what the Dodge layer mode is in a second but I just wanted to demonstrate what a non commutative layer mode was all right so now that I demonstrated that I'm gonna switch this to the next layer mode which is actually luma or luminance light and only I'm gonna switch this one back to normal so luma illuminance lighten only is actually very similar to lighten only the result is almost exactly the same except it's keeping the lighter pixel value between the top and bottom layers based on the luma or luminance value of the layer as opposed to just using whatever pixel value is lighter so the difference between luminance and lightness is very minut luminance is actually a unit of perceived brightness and that is taking into account both hue and lightness so color is factored in here as well as lightness whereas lightness itself is obviously just lightness it's only one variable so you'll see the main difference here is that luminance is also taking into account the brightness of a color hopefully that makes sense for you guys so to sum that up with little bit more simply the layer mode is still just picking out which pixel is the brighter of the two pixels from the top or the bottom layer but it's also factoring in the brightness of the color as well so the next layer mode is screen so I'm just going to change this to screen and I think it's important to go through the equation of this layer mode because it does play a pretty big role in how this effect is created so bear with me here screen inverts the value of all pixels between the two layers that are being blended so takes the pixel value from this top layer inverts it and then subtract that value from the inverse value of all the pixels from the bottom layer so after it subtracts those two values it then divides it by 255 and you'll remember 255 is the value assigned to white and the inverse is then taken from that final value to simplify all that craziness from that formula the values are inverted divided and then invert it again and the final product is an overall lightened image because basically what happens with all of that is that most of the dark pixels or the black pixels are taken out of the layer so you'll see here after we applied that screen layer mode to this top layer pretty much all of those dark pixels have been removed including the black pixels from here and what you're left with is an overall brighter looking image so if I set this back to normal this was a pretty dark image compared to what the final result was and let me set this back to screen so that has screened out all the dark colors and I've used this layer mode in other tutorials where I'm trying to get rid of the black background out of an image this quickly will remove a black background from an image this is another commutator of layer mode which means if I add this layer mode screen to the bottom layer and I switch the order of these you'll see that the final result is the same no matter what order they're in I'll change this back to the normal layer mode same with the bottom layer our next layer mode is Dodge so let me click on our top layer and change the layer mode to Dodge and this was the example we used as the non commutative layer mode because the order of this does matter for the final result but dodge lightens or inverts colors on the layer and we're going to get into the formula here briefly so the Dodge layer mode lightens or in colors on a layer by multiplying the pixels on the bottom layer by 256 and dividing that number by the inverse of the top layer so actually admits that the dodge layer mode actually works a little bit better with something like the paint tool there also is a Dodge burn tool so there's a tool dedicated to dodge and then burn is the counterpart to dodge it actually does the opposite of Dodge and we're gonna get into that a little bit later but just keep in mind that you can use this as a layer mode but actually recommends using it in a tool instead so essentially all you need to know about the Dodge layer mode is that it is going to lighten your image overall so dodging was used in dark rooms to brighten areas of an image by decreasing the exposure of the film negative and that sounds like a mouthful but basically all you need to know about film negatives and how it relates to here is that a film negative produced the opposite in the actual photo so if you decrease the exposure and a film negative it would cause an increase in exposure in the final photo and hearing they're trying to emulate that dodging process by brightening your photo all right so moving on to our next layer mode I'm going to add addition to our top layer so let me change the layer mode from Dodge to addition and you'll see this also lightens the layer this is the last of our light and layer types and what this does is it's adding the pixel value from the top layer to the pixel value from the bottom layer and any pixel values from that equation that exceed 255 are going to be turned into a pure white pixel and this is going to brighten our image overall because if you think about it remember pixel values that are closer to zero are going to be darker and pixel values that are closer to 255 are going to be white or they're gonna be lighter so by adding the pixel values from the bottom and the top layer you are essentially increasing every single pixel value across the board unless of course it's a pure black so if you have pure black on pure black it's just gonna stay black because zero plus zero is zero and this layer mode is also a commutator layer mode so again if I add addition to the bottom layer as well and then I swap these you'll see there's no change to this so it doesn't matter the order of the layers here it's going to produce the same effect no matter what alright so next we're going to get into the darken layer mode type so all of these layer modes were about to go over are going to darken your image overall I'm gonna start with the first one which is probably the simplest and that is the dark and only layer mode so let me come over here to our top layer and change the layer mode here to darken only so you'll see that's obviously a lot darker of an image then the light and only so there's light and only here's dark and only so this layer mode is actually the opposite of the light and only layer mode because instead of keeping the lighter of the two pixels between the top and bottom layers it's only going to keep the darker of the two pixels between those two layers so if I hold ctrl and zoom in with my mouse all of the leftover pixels here from this equation are the darkest of the pixels and let me just do the comparison so if I switch this to normal and then hide this layer you'll see that these pixels are pretty dark these pixels here are pretty light and then if I unhide this layer these pixels are pretty light most of these pixels are fairly dark here these pixels right here are fairly bright where you see some white here so when I add the dark and only layer mode to this you'll see the lips the pixels from the lips here are darker than the pixels from the nose that were right here but the pixels from the shadow of the nodes are actually darker so those are what we're kept right here so that's what the dark and only layer mode does it does create kind of a weird spliced final image if I put an all white layer here so if I create a new layer keep the name color and I'm gonna change the fill with to white and click OK so right now this layer mode set to lighten only if I select dark and only here it's not going to keep any of the pixels from this layer because all of the pixels from the white layer are white and that's obviously the lightest a pixel can be and this layer mode is only keeping the darkest pixels you also see here that I have three layers stacked and they are all actually interacting with one another technically speaking a layer mode is only going to interact with a layer below it but if that layer below it also has a layer mode that is going to interact with the layer below it and so that's how you're gonna get all three of these to be interacting with one another so let me just delete this layer the next layer mode is essentially the same and that is the luma luminance dark and only layer so you'll see that that created almost the same exact result except that it's producing the darkest pixel between the top bottom layers based on the Illuma or luminance value so it's not just taking into account the lightness or brightness of a pixel it's also taking into account the perceived brightness of a color within that pixel so it does just produce a slightly different effect although the effects are very similar so next I'm going to change this to our layer mode multiply so this multiplies the pixel values of the upper layer with those of the layer below it and then divides the result by 255 so if you think about what this layer mode is doing from a mathematical standpoint let's say your top pixel value is 10 and your bottom pixel value is 25 so it's multiplying these together which is going to give you 250 and then you divide that by 255 and that's gonna give you a little less than 1 and a little less than 1 means it's very close to zero and remember zero is black so what it did is it took these two pixel values 10 and 25 plugged them into this formula and it created a lower number so between 10 and 25 you get a little less than 1 which is less than both of those values we just plugged in so what this equation is doing is it's creating darker pixels overall across the board because it's shrinking the value of all of these pixels and the smaller the value of the pixel is the darker that pixel is going to be so an important thing to note is that if one of these layers is black so let me just add a new layer here and we'll set the name to color we'll fill this with transparency for now and let me grab my foreground tool choose black and fill in this layer with black keys and my bucket fill tool and let me change the layer mode of this over to luma illuminants darken only you'll see the final result is going to be all black whenever we use black as our layer and that's because every pixel value of the black layer is going to be 0 0 times anything is 0 and you can't divide into 0 so basically you're just always left over with black for every pixel between both images white on the other hand so I'll just turn this value over to white you'll see that's just going to create basically a completely transparent layer I'll just go ahead and delete that layer and the next layer mode we're gonna use is burn and as I mentioned burn is the counterpart to Dodge and so pretty much all the same rules apply to burn except it does the opposite as to what Dodge does so instead of brightening the image it's gonna darken it so again this layer mode was born from the technique used in the darkroom film days when you were trying to in this case decrease the exposure in your final image by increasing the exposure in your film negative and so basically the burn tool is emulating that through its formula and the final result is going to be an overall darkened image alright so moving on our next layer mode is the linear burn layer mode so let me switch my layer mode here to linear burn this is actually very similar to the multiply layer mode so you'll see the difference is only a very slight here between the two linear burn takes the bottom layers pixel value plus the top layers pixel value then subtracts 255 so instead of multiplying the two pixel values together from the top and bottom layer and then dividing by 255 you're adding those two pixel values together and then subtracting by 255 so you're getting a slightly different final pixel value but in essence for both the multiply and the linear burn layer modes you are getting a darker image overall alright so next we're gonna get into the contrast layer types so I'm gonna start here with our top layer I'm going to change the mode to overlay so what overlay does is it uses a lengthy equation and this equation is a combination of multiply in screen and the result of this is it makes your lights lighter and it makes your darks darker and it's gonna make your mid-tones basically unchanged so this is mostly gonna affect the contrast of your image hence whites in the contrast layer type but you'll see like in this case that it's also affecting the brightness of the image so the image has become a little bit brighter overall and I think the overall look of your final image that's being produced is going to depend on how many dark pixels are in your image and how many light pixels are in your image because again it's making those darks darker and those lights lighter next is the soft light layer mode so let me change this to soft light so this layer mode is actually very similar to overlay only it's going to make your final image look a little bit softer and a little bit less bright the equation for this layer mode is per complicated because it uses its own lengthy equation and then it adds to that the equation from the screen mode when you're using a color like white with this layer mode so let me add a new layer here change the layer mode to soft light and then I'm gonna fill this with white and I'll click OK and let me change the layer mode of this top layer to normal so when you're using a color like white it's essentially creating a diffused light so you'll see that let me just turn the opacity down on this so you'll see that the overall photo here looks a little bit softer but it's also a little bit lighter so it's sort of like using a diffused light on your subject and let me hide this layer so you could see this in action with the lower layer so if I hide this white layer you'll see that the photo is a little bit darker and then if I just unhide that layer you'll see it's a little softer and a little bit brighter here so it's almost like we had a very bright diffused soft light going on in the photo so I'll just delete that white layer and then unhide that top layer so I should mention that overlaying soft light actually used to be the same exact layer mode they produce the same exact effect in older versions of but they updated these two layer modes for 2.10 so that the effects between the two are now slightly different so our next layer mode in is called hard light and it actually uses two separate methods depending on the pixel value within the image so if the pixel value of the top layer is greater than 128 so this is all the brighter pixels it's going to use one equation and then if the pixel values are lower than 128 in that top layer it's going to use another equation so basically it's going to depend on whether it's a brighter pixel or a darker pixel the type of equation that's used and what this ends up doing is it makes the darker pixels even darker and it makes the brighter pixels even brighter so this layer mode is very similar to overlay and that it uses a combination of multiply in screen except the final equation for hard light is a little bit different than overlay so it's going to produce a slightly different result but what it's going to do is it's going to either add shadows or highlights to your image again depending on that pixel value and when your top layer is a color other than black and white let's say like an orange or something it's going to produce what looks like a hard spotlight hence the name hard light for this layer mode so let me go ahead and demonstrate here so I'll start by setting this top layer to the hard light layer mode just so you guys can see so as you can see the lighter pixels here the pixels with values above 128 have been made even brighter so that's made her forehead really bright here and then the darker pixels which would be like her hair have become even darker and that just applies across the entire image here let me set this back to normal and I'm actually going to create a new layer and I think it's going to be more efficient to demonstrate this with a color and I'm gonna change the mode here to hard light and I'm just going to fill this with transparency for now and click OK so let's start with a gradient so I have my gradient tool selected here and I just click this icon to reset my colors to black and white and now I'm going to draw this gradient from the top left to the bottom right so the top left had black as my color the bottom right had white I'll hit the enter key so you can see that the pixels got darker where I had the black color and where it's pure black in the gradient the colors just turned to pure black and then same over here with the white and then the mid-tones over here sort of almost disappeared or just really don't have much effect and I can decrease the opacity so this is decreasing it all the way to see it before and then if I slowly increase it you can see what this is doing so that's using black and white but let me get rid of that color layer and create a new one so I'll keep the same settings I'll set the mode to hard light again and click OK this time let's go with the bucket fill tool and let me just choose a color let's go with blue for now and fill this in so this is making this layer look as if it has a spotlight that is a blue color light on the photo let me hit control Z I think it actually might be better to demonstrate with the gradient tool again and let me change the color here to foreground and transparent so that way we have a blue going into a transparency and I'm going to change the shape here to radial and now you can see our spotlight here looks like a blue spotlight on our image wherever we move this and I could try to change the color here so let's go with more of an orange so same thing here just looks like a pretty harsh spotlight it actually is easier to tell with this warmer color here and I'll hit enter so that's what the hard light looks like here and let's just go back and compare that to the soft light real quick so there's the soft light much softer more diffused look and here's the hard light much harsher light and it looks more like a spotlight there so our next layer mode which is vivid light is actually similar to hard light except it's going to apply a color dodge to colors that are lighter than 50% gray or just the lighter colors lighter pixels in our image or it's going to apply a color burn to colors that are darker than 50% gray so that's just the darker pixels in our image so whenever the color dodge is applied that's going to decrease the contrast in your image whenever the color burn is applied it's going to increase the contrast in our image so this is just working on the contrast of our top image here and it's going to blend that into the bottom image so let me demonstrate so I'll just delete this color layer and I'm on my top layer here so let me come over to mode and change the mode of this to vivid light so as you can see similar to the hard light the lighter pixels have taken on a lighter value and in this case they've just turned almost to pure white and then the darker pixels have just become darker except in this case it is more applied to the contrast of these colors so there's a lot more contrast in the darker areas and a lot less in the lighter areas so our next layer mode is pin light and that's going to apply the darken and lighten layer modes to our pixels depending on whether or not is again a lighter pixel lighter than 50% gray or a darker pixel darker than 50% gray so the lighter pixels will receive the lightened layer mode and the darker pixels will receive the darkened layer mode so again making our lights lighter and making our darks darker and the mid-tones or the middle gray parts of our image so those are the pixels that are right at 50% gray those are just going to disappear altogether so let me come over here and change the layer mode of the top layer and I'll change this to pin light so again our lights are lighter so the lighter part of her forehead is much lighter now the darks are darker again looking at the hair and in this case with this layer mode all of the middle gray colors have been removed and let me change this back to normal and I'm going to create a new layer and this time I'm going to change the layer mode to pin light and I'll click okay and using our blend tool with black and white selected and let me make sure that I change the blend mode here to foreground a background and so now I'm going to draw this and you'll see our darks get darker wherever there's black the middle gray part of the image so that's the middle of the blend wherever black is turning to white just disappears altogether and then as we get towards white again it's going to use that light and layer mode so I'll hit enter so this is the effect created by this gradient using this pin light layer mode and actually let me just demonstrate this with the vivid light layer mode since I didn't do that before so here you'll see the bottom right corner there's a lot less contrast but it's a lot brighter and in the top left corner where we had black there's a lot more contrast but it's also a little bit darker so let me change this layer mode back to pin light the next layer mode is linear light and this again is very similar to the other layer modes we've been going through and that is that it makes our lights lighter in our dark starker except this time whenever the pixels are lighter than middle gray lighter than 50% middle gray it's going to use linear dodge and whenever our pixels are darker than 50% middle gray it's going to use linear burn and this of course is either going to lighten or darken our existing pixels in that top layer that we're blending so let's come over to our composition and for this one I'm just gonna keep this color layer here and I'm just going to change the layer mode to linear light so up here in the top left we have linear burn and down here we have linear dodge and that's making our darks less bright and making our lights more bright and I can hide this color mode and apply the layer mode to our top image here just to see what this looks like and we've got pretty much the same thing brighter pixels wherever we had pixel values that were greater than 50% middle gray and less bright pixels wherever we had pixel values less than 50% middle gray and I'll just change this layer mode back to normal so the last layer mode for this section of the layer modes is called hard mix and what this does is it adds all of the pixel values between red green and blue of the top pixel in the bottom pixel and if that value is greater than 255 it's going to just set that value at 255 and if that value is less than 2:55 it'll just set that value to zero and what that's going to do is it's going to make all of your red green and blue pixel values set to either 255 or 0 thus making all of the pixel values in your image what's called a primary additive and that's really like a pure form of red green or blue so let me demonstrate this here if I come over here to our top layer and I change this to hard mix you'll see that our colors here have become either a pure white or you can see here there's like pure blue pure teal a lot of pure colors in here reds oranges colors of that nature and if I just change this back to normal and let me just delete this color layer here and create a new one so we'll just again set this to color but we're going to change the layer mode here to hard mix and click OK and now let's change our blend here or our foreground and our background color so we've got blue and then let's go with a contrasting color so let's go with more of an orange or an orangish yellow I'll click OK and using our blend tool again and making sure this is set to fade to our foreground and background colors I'm just going to draw this gradient now and you'll see remember in the top left we had that blue color so now these have become pure blue and then the middle Gray's have become sort of a pure white when they're mixed in with the very bright pixels of this original image the top layer image and then down here everything starts to become a pure yellow pretty much or pure red so basically tones of this orange or just colors that are nearby on the color wheel so I'll hit enter so that just creates a very interesting mix of colors there so now I'm just going to delete this color layer as we head into the next section of our layer modes and that is the inversion section starting with difference and what this layer mode does and bear with me on the explanation here is it's going to take the absolute value of the top pixel layer values minus the bottom pixel layer values so what that's going to do essentially is it's going to take the top layer minus the bottom layer and then it's going to just make that number a positive even if that's a negative so let's say that you do you know 150 minus 250 so you get negative 1 as the final pixel value by taking the absolute value of that negative 100 number you're going to get 100 and what this layer mode does essentially is it's going to invert a lot of the colors if not most of the colors so coming over here to our composition if I change the mode of this to difference you'll see we have a lot of inverted colors so wherever we had dark pixels and pixels that were black or close to black we now have white or close to white and then same with the brighter pixels those now become closer to a black color and this layer mode can be useful let's say when you're trying to realign an image so let me set this layer mode back to normal and duplicate this layer and now I'm going to change the layer mode of that top layer to difference so when all of the pixels are aligned it's just going to create a pure black image but if I grab my move tool and I move this image a little bit to the right you'll see that some of the pixels start to show up again so this is how you'll know that this image has been aligned using this difference mode and I don't recommend trying to align images by hand unless you absolutely have to you you can always use the alignment tool here so I can just click on this top layer and just align relative to image and align these images up with one another and now this comes back to black so I'll just delete that top layer the next layer mode is called exclusion and it's almost exactly the same as difference except it's just a more mild form so like difference it's going to create inverted colors but the colors are just not going to be as intense so if I come over here and change the layer mode to exclusion you'll see we still have inverted colors here they're just not as intense and let me just change this back to normal again duplicate this and change the layer mode at the top to exclusion you'll see that this technique doesn't work really with this layer mode here because we don't produce an absolute black so let me just delete that so our next layer mode is subtract and as the name implies it does pretty much the exact opposite of the addition layer mode so it's going to subtract the top layer pixel value from the bottom layer pixel value and any pixel that is less than zero is just going to be set to black and so this is going to create a darker image but it's also going to invert the image so coming over here to our composition I'll set the top layer here to be subtract layer and as you can see it not only makes the composition darker overall but it also inverts a lot of the colors here and that's why this is within our inversion layer modes our next layer mode is grain extract and this layer mode subtracts the pixel value of the upper layer from that of the lower layer and then adds 128 to that so this produces an image that is pure grain or in other words is all of the film grain extracted from the top image so if I click on grain extract all that is left on that top layer is going to be the pure grain and when using two different images like in this case you can see it's going to create an inverted effect hence why this is within the inversion layer modes but if we use the same image so let me just duplicate this top layer and I'm going to change the original layer back to normal at first this is going to create more of a great image you can see when I move this top layer over a little bit it's going to definitely show the graininess created by this layer mode and in fact this looks very similar to the high pass filter which is found by going to filters enhance high pass this is sort of the look that you're going to get using that filter so our next layer mode is called grain merge and it is similar to grain extract except instead of adding the top and bottom layer pixel values and then adding 128 to that it's going to subtract the top and bottom layer pixel values and then subtract 128 from that final value so this layer mode really works best when you take a composition such as this one that we created using the green extract layer mode and you add that on top of an image and then apply the grain merge layer mode to this composition here or this top layer image and let me demonstrate that for you real quick because that's kind of confusing so here I've got our composition that has the grain extract applied to it if I click and drag this over here to our original image and just drop this on top of the image you'll see our top layer is now that grain extract layer and so I can just rename this grain extract layer so if I take this layer that has the grain extract on it and I change the layer mode of it to grain merge it's going to merge this grain extract layer with the original bottom image layer and that is just basically going to create a grainy look image as you can see this image looks a lot greener than it did before so here's our before and here's an after and this almost gives this image like a 1970s vintage film look so I suppose that's one application for this if you want to make photos look a little bit aged or almost like they were taken on a film camera alright so navigating back to our original composition here I'm just going to delete this top layer copy our next layer mode is divided and this multiplies each pixel value in the top layer by 256 and then divides that by the corresponding pixel value of the upper layer plus one so this is all a very complicated equation but at the end of the day all it does is it creates a burned-out looking image or what it also does is it'll take a color tint that's in your image and go ahead and - that color tint out so it effectively removes color tints from your image and I'll demonstrate that here with our top image so using this top layer as a reference I'm going to create a new layer and I'll change the layer mode of this to divide and I'm just gonna fill this with transparency for now and click OK now I'm going to take my foreground color grab my color picker tool and I'm just going to choose a color from the wall back here and you'll see it's sort of an off-white color and let's say that the reason I'm doing this is I want the wall to look a little bit more like a pure white so I'll click OK here and then I'm gonna use my bucket fill tool and just fill this color layer in with that off-white color and you'll see that what that's done since our color layer is set to the divide mode is it's removed that tint from the back wall there and so it's made our whites look more like a pure white and so this is just improve the color of the image overall assuming you want to get rid of a certain color tint in an image and let me hide these two layers and I'm gonna perform the same action with the bottom layer so I'll create a new layer keep the layer mode set to divide and click OK and let's say I want to remove the bluish tint from here I can grab my foreground color and with my color picker tool just choose the white in here by the ocean or whatever body of water this is and so what this is going to do essentially is it's going to take this off-white color and it's going to make it a more of a pure white color and I think the color I grabbed was a bit too yeah it looks like I grabbed the pure white so let me just grab a color that's a little bit of blue in it and using my bucket fill tool fill this in and you'll see that's remove some of the blue tint from this bottom image here so now I'll just delete these color layers and unhide our top layer alright so finally with our layer modes we are getting into the last section and that is going to be the component section of our layer modes and the first layer mode in this section is going to be HSV hue and what this is going to do is take the hue from our top layer and combine it with the saturation and value of the bottom layer so in layman's terms this combines the color of our top layer with the intensity and brightness of the bottom layer so coming back to our composition I'll create a new layer of course named color and I'm going to come down HSV hue and I'll click OK and let me just change this to a random color let's go with this red color here so in theory it should make everything a sort of red tint while keeping the brightness and the intensity of the colors below so I'll fill that in with red so as you can see everything's got a red tint here her skin is looking a little bit more red the wall everything has a red tint but the intensity of the colors and the brightness of the colors have remained the same so this is one effective way to recolor our photos or our artwork within so some of the layer modes within the component section are going to recolor your work whereas other layer modes in this section are simply going to adjust the intensity or the brightness or the purity of our colors and of course you're gonna see that as we get into this so one last note about the HSV hue is that this is useful when you just want to change the color of your image or your layer and you don't want to change any other properties within this image or layer so I'm going to keep this red color here for our next layer mode and that is going to be HSV saturation so what this does is it keeps the saturation of our top layer while keeping the hue and the value of the bottom layer so as you can see what this does is it intensifies the saturation of all of our colors across the board in this image and that can create some funky results here so anything that had a tint for example this head I guess a yellowish tint to it this one had a bluish tint and just so on with the colors throughout it's going to intensify the saturation of those tints to make them as saturated as the colors and the layer on top so in this case since we had a very saturated red as our top layer it's just gone ahead and made everything supersaturated in the layer below and if I hide this top layer it's going to blend with this bottom layer here and same thing applies here everything just becomes a very saturated version of itself so this layer mode is useful when you want to change the intensity of the colors within the image without changing the actual colors or the lightness or darkness of the colors within that image so our next layer mode is HSL color and it's easy to overlook the fact that this is HSL color not HSV color so the L stands for lightness so this takes the hue and saturation from your top layer and combines that with the lightness of the bottom layer and this is useful when you're recoloring black and white photos so a lot of those tutorials on how to recolor a black and white photograph are going to use this layer mode or at least it should in some way so let me demonstrate here on a black and white photo so I'm going to go to file and in my case open recent because I open this photo recently so this is just an image of an old Mercedes obviously this has color to it right now so not super effective and what I'm trying to demonstrate but I'll just turn this into a black and white image by going to colors desaturate desaturate MIDC ate this based on luminance and click ok so now we have a black and white car here let's say I want to make this car the red color we've been using so create a new layer and I'm going to change the layer mode of this to HSL color and I'm going to fill this with our foreground color which is going to be our red right here and I'll click OK so now you'll see our entire car has turned into this red color if I wanted to just color certain parts of this car I could right click and add a layer mask and under initialize layer mask 2 I can click black and then make sure this invert mask option is unchecked and click Add so now that's completely hidden our red layer and I can grab a paintbrush here switch the colors to black and white and switch my foreground color to white and now wherever I paint white on this layer mask is going to paint our car red and of course this car was already red in the original image so maybe that's not as exciting so let me change this actually to green grab our bucket fill tool click on our original layer and with green instead and now our red Mercedes is a bright green color so grab our paintbrush tool again switch the colors back to black and white switch the foreground color back to white and continue painting all right so I'll just leave that as is for now just for the sake of time but you can see how useful this HSL color layer mode can really be when you're trying to recolor your black and white artwork so let's move on to HSV value which you'll notice is switch back to HSB from HSL so we're dealing with hue saturation value again what this will do is it'll take the value of the top layer and combine that with the hue and saturation from the bottom layer and so I'll show you what kind of effect this will produce by coming back over to our original composition so I'll change this color layer to the HSV value so value is basically the lightness of the layer so because this is a very light color it's turning our bottom layer here to a very light image while still maintaining the overall hue and saturation of the image and if I unhide the top layer you'll see it'll perform the same thing so let me hide this here's a before here's an after so this is a much lighter image but the hues and saturations overall are still pretty much the same so the next layer modes on here are the LCH layer modes these are still component layer modes the difference is that they use a different color space so instead of using hue saturation value or hue saturation lightness they're gonna use lightness chroma and hue so lightness is most similar to value chroma most similar to saturation and hue is of course the same it's still hue chroma and saturation differ because chroma is more of the purity of the color and it also incorporates the saturation of the color whereas saturation is more so just the intensity of the color and so these are going to perform the same things as the hue saturation value layer modes except of course it's going to affect the lightness chroma and hue values of our layers so let's dive into the first layer mode which is the LCH hue so this is going to keep the hue of the top layer while keeping the lightness and the chroma of the bottom layer so as you can see it still has a red tint much like HSV hue did except the tints are different so here's HSV hue so it's almost like a darker red and then here is the LCH you so still a red hue but it's just a slightly less intense hue there so here's before without the tint at all and here's after and now let's switch this layer mode to LCH chroma so very similar to HSV saturation except instead of keeping the saturation of our top layer which is our red color it's going to keep the chroma or the purity of that red color and it's going to assign that purity value to the hue and the lightness from the layer below so you get those very pure yellows and blues since there were tents of these colors before and of course the more pure colors here in the skin tones and then next we have the LCH color so this is going to be similar to H I'll color except instead of hue saturation lightness we're using lightness chroma and hue so the main difference is going to be using chroma instead of saturation for this one so here it is applied to our red layer on our top layer and if I come back over here to our black and white Mercedes this layer mode is actually used for the same purpose as HSL color so it's great for recoloring black and white photos you're just going to get a slightly different color out of it so I'll come over here and change the layer mode to LCH color so here we're gonna get a sort of a darker green here as opposed to that lighter green when using HSL color and let's come back over to our original composition and we're going to change this now to LCH lightness so we are keeping the lightness of the top layer with the chroma and the hue of the bottom layer so in this case the effect is kind of strange and that's because the lightness of this red I suppose is not super light if I change this to our white color here so a pure white you'll see it's going to be a lot lighter and so it's combining this very light top layer with our chroma and our hue from the bottom layer and last but not least we have our layer mode luminance so this uses the luminance from the top layer and combines it with the hue and chroma from the bottom layer and this will actually create an inverse result as would the LCH color layer mode and I'll demonstrate that in a second it's also going to be only a slightly different result from the LCH lightness layer mode the reason being that lightness and luminance are actually very similar but if you'll remember from earlier in this tutorial luminance is actually a unit of perceived brightness whereas lightness is basically just going to be brightness those are almost synonymous terms there but luminance is also going to use a little bit of a hue value there since hues do have naturally a little bit of luminance to them so luminance again is perceived brightness so it's going to differ only slightly from lightness so let me come over here and demonstrate all of those so here we have our white color layer and I'm just going to change the mode from luminance to LCH color so you can see that the LCH color is an inverse layer mode to the luminance layer mode and now I'm just going to change this to LCH lightness so there's lightness and there's and the results are different but they are just slightly different there so hopefully that helps you distinguish the different LCH layer modes from one another especially comparing lightness to luminance and luminance to LCH color so that's it for this tutorial thanks for watching if you liked it please subscribe to our youtube channel at youtube.com slash Davey's media design you can also visit our website at Davey's media design com you can enroll in our best-selling photo editing course from beginner to pro photo retoucher on udemy and you could support our channel and help us grow by becoming a patron on patreon and I'll include a link to that as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video so thanks for watching and we'll see you next time you

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 56,336

Rating: 4.9234891 out of 5

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, gimp graphic design, gimp photo editing, gimp 2018, GIMP 2.10, GIMP, basics, Layer Modes, GIMP 2.10.6, GIMP feature spotlight, blend modes, lighten, darken, grain merge, grain extract, luminance, HSL, HSV, LCH, addition, soft light, overlay, hard light, pin light, photo manipulation, photo effects, photo editing, photo blending, getting started with GIMP, GIMP intro, GIMP course

Id: 17Iivi0tmug

Length: 58min 32sec (3512 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 09 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/eXoRainbow]

3:58 Overview
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6:18 Normal
7:26 Dissolve
9:10 Color erase
11:14 Erase
13:52 Merge
14:23 Split
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14:58 Lighten only
18:23 Luma/Luminance lighten only
19:25 Screen
21:07 Dodge
22:35 Addition
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23:50 Darken only
25:46 Luma/Luminance darken only
26:11 Multiply
27:58 Burn
28:31 Linear burn
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29:14 Overlay
29:56 Soft light
31:23 Hard light
34:48 Vivid light
36:25 Pin light
38:09 Linear light
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38:45 Hard mix
40:50 Difference
42:32 Exclusion
43:25 Subtract
43:39 Grain extract
44:36 Grain merge
46:04 Divide
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48:16 HSV Hue
49:37 HSV Saturation
50:37 HSL Color
52:44 HSV Value
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54:17 LCh Hue
54:47 LCh Chroma
55:14 LCh Color
55:56 LCh Lightness
56:23 Luminance