Krita tutorial: Understanding Krita's blending modes

blending modes are mathematical formulas that describe how the pixels you paint on a given layer affect the pixels below it they are used to produce all sorts of time-saving effects to darken to lighten your art to add contrast to make colors more vibrant or even to replace colors you'll get to use them a ton they are very very useful here I've set up a document to show you a few of the most common blending modes in CR and to tell you a bit about how to use them so first of all there are two places where you can find those blending modes there is a drop- down menu in the toolbar and a similar one in the layers doer they both provide the same set of blending modes and each entry in the list corresponds to a different mathematical equation you've already used blending modes without knowing it when you click on the little erase icon and you start erasing you are virtually switching to the erase blending mode one of the first in the list erasing is a way to do the opposite of the normal blending mode the one you are using most of the time the normal blending mode just takes your color in the Color Picker and when you paint it applies it on top of the layers below it just replaces the pixels that are on screen with your selected color and it uses your opacity as well so that if you paint at 100% opacity it will completely replace the pixels below but if you paint at 50% opacity or with a softer brush it will gently overlay the paint on top of the existing pixels so that's for the most basic ones then there are two blending modes that that are very useful for lightening and darkening your painting the first one is the multiply mode so it's called like that because under the hood what it does is it multiplies the color that's on the canvas with the color you are painting the result is that instead of adding the new color on top of the previous one it actually darkens the existing colors on the canvas it is used a lot to draw Shadows but also to add colors to a grayscale image we will get to use it a lot in the future you can see how you can pick a given color and paint on top of itself with the multiply mode and an nailbrush and it's going to create some nice soft colorful Shadow it doesn't work perfectly with all tones though but it does work pretty well with oranges and greens as you can see the next blending mode is the screen mode this one does kind of the opposite of the multiply mode it lightens your image based on the color you have selected you can see that lightening with an orange doesn't give the same effect as lightening with a blue it will pull your color towards the one that you selected however it will lighten it at the same time to show you the next blending mode I'm going to have to modify the shapes a little and I'm going to add some darker Shades okay so the next ones are lighten and darken lighten Works in that way if I pick a dark color and I start to paint you will see that it only Paints in the dark areas of my layers the lighten mode just keeps the pixels that are lightest on the canvas the orange the blue and the light green here are lighter than the color I've picked but if I start to pick a white color I'm going to override the existing orange blue and light green so it is used to paint inside of dark areas like nuts and crannies cracks for instance if you want to add Moss to a crack the light and mode can be very useful and there is that opposite Mode called darken which does just the opposite if I pick a light color you can see that it only Paints in the light area it keeps the dark colors the dark and blending mode is useful if you want to paint on top of highlight the next blending mode I'm going to show you is extremely useful it's called overlay look at what it does if I use a very bright color white it lightens and add contrast to my layers if I use a very dark color black it darkens and add contrast to my colors it works in two ways at once if you use light color it's going to lighten your colors if you use dark colors it's going to darken your colors it's in a sense a combination of multiply and screen but on top of that it does add contrast and spices up your shading you can overlay with all sorts of colors to get very rich effects if I start to Overlay green on top of that green shape it's going to move towards very bright and vibrant colors but also a bit towards yellow the overlay blending mode can help you to achieve all sorts of nice effects and a bit like the multiply mode it can be very useful when it comes to coloring a grayscale image there is another mode that's very useful when it comes to adding color contrast and it's called color Dodge this one will work a bit like the overlay but it will only brighten your colors it uses your foreground color the brighter the color you have picked the more it will apply that color and if you start using a darker color it will still brighten the image but it will do that that much lower and it will apply a little bit of the tint of your color to the layer below you can see how it produces really nice soft shading but it's also very useful when it comes to adding contrast and completely blowing up your colors and highlights there is one mode that's extremely useful that's called color and this one is just used to replace the colors on the canvas with the color you have picked in the Color Picker it's going to replace the Hue and the saturation of the colors you affect if I pick a blue color it's going to replace everything with blue if I pick a red color it's going to replace everything with some kind of pink red but as it retains the Luminosity of your layer it does produce a range of colors instead of just replacing everything with a single color like the normal mode and as you can expect this blending mode is not only useful for recoloring but also for coloring a grayscale image blending modes is a very complex topic that requires a lot of practice so instead of adding lots of less useful blending modes to our list I'm going to show you some things you can do to to better work with blending modes in Crea first of all if you can access blending modes manually from the menu in the toolbar I really recommend that you use keyboard shortcuts instead there is a long list of keyboard shortcuts Associated to blending mode and you'll find an entire category dedicated to that in the preferences window you can see there's a ton of them but thankfully you don't have to remember them all they all use a combination of alt shift and a letter often the letter corresponds to the first letter of the blending mode for instance if you press shift alt s you are going to get the screen blending mode if you press shift alt n you're going to get the normal blending mode shift alt M brings the multiply blending mode you also have shift alt D for color Dodge and shift alt C for color then you will have shift alt o for overlay however the darken and the lighten blending modes are less easy to access they are respectively mapped to shift alt G for lighten and shift alt k for darken however these shortcuts only control the blending modes in the toolbar which are different from the ones in the layers darker when you apply a blending mode in the layers Docker it will only apply to the selected layer if I set a new layer to multiply and I paint in normal mode you will see that it does multiply with the layers below it these blending modes that are associated with a layer are non destructive you can change them at any time the blending modes that you have in the toolbar and that you access with keyboard shortcuts are on the other hand destructive the pixels get applied on your canvas and they transform the colors definitively note that the blending mode that you set in the toolbar will get saved with your brush presets if you check the brushes by David raoa he has a selection of FX brushes and if I click on them pay attention to how the blending mode changes in the toolbar his FX brushes are actually just using different blending modes one last thing I want to show you is that when you use a color smudge brush you might get weird results with your blending mode this is due to the fact that these brushes can blend paint on the canvas and they will only apply Color at least in the brush presets I've made if you start to press hard on the brush so by default it will only mix colors on the canvas you can use them to both apply certain effects and mix the result with the colors that are on your layer this is quite handy I really recommend that you use the keyboard shortcuts to switch between blending modes or experiment with shift alt and pressing keys most letters are mapped to a blending mode and you will see the blending mode change in your toolbar instantly so you just have to learn them that way you'll have to experiment a lot with blending modes to get a good hang of them so get started today and we'll see each other in the next video where we will talk about the multibrush wraparound and symmetry tools

Channel: GDQuest

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Keywords: Krita blending mode, krita blending modes tutorial, krita blending, how to blend in krita, blending in krita, how to blend colors in krita, how to shade in krita, blending modes, krita tutorial coloring, Krita tutorial, blending mode, krita tutorial for beginners, GDquest, Nathan Lovato, Game Design Quest, Krita 3, blending modes explained, krita 3 tutorial, krita 3.0, digital painting (visual art genre), digital art

Id: 3korE3Xn4eg

Length: 11min 44sec (704 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 15 2016