The Color vs Luminosity Blend Mode in Photoshop

hello Blake Burt is here with f/64 Academy in f/64 leet and today I'm going to target to blend modes specifically the color blend mode and the luminosity blend mode and the reason why I'm targeting these two is that they are polar opposites of each other like if any blend modes could be absolute opposites these are the two but they're both used for very specific things in Photoshop that can be extremely helpful for you and your workflow so as recently asked a question about blend modes and the specific question was how do you know when to use color and when we use luminosity and the funny thing about that is that they're actually polar opposites I mean complete polar opposites the color blend mode and the luminosity blend mode but they're very powerful in separating the color or the luminance value from a specific edit that you're trying to do so I'm going to try to explain this the best way I possibly can because if you go to the Adobe blogs they actually give you a good write-up of what all the blend modes are but they can be kind of confusing so let's take a look at this the color blend mode creates a result color with the luminance of the base color and the hue and saturation of the blend color luminosity creates a result color with the hue and saturation of the base color but the luminance of the blend color and you're like what if you're anything like me you know reading these Adobe blogs that can really be helpful for you but we have to do some things in Photoshop in order to figure that out so here's the image that we're going to be doing the example on we're going to call this the base layer okay because the whole nomenclature of all the stuff that we just talked about on there it's very helpful when we understand that this is the base layer and anything that's above it will be the blend layer okay so I'm going to call this base and I'm going to do something here I'm going to I'm going to add a adjustment layer to this and when I add this curves adjustment layer to this I'm going to do some really kind of funky things to this because I want you to see something when this is set to normal here is our other blend modes color and luminosity are down here when this is set to normal it's basically saying okay curves adjustment layer everything that you do to this image is going to be recorded on it when it comes to the color that you're going to modify and the luminance values that you're going to modify so if I were to just do our typical s-curve and just boom just do that just like that what you'll notice is that as I do that s-curve not only does the contrast to get a little bit thicker in the image but our colors kind of change a little bit too and we can see that when we look right down here I'm going to go and turn that layer off and turn that layer on notice how the oranges and the purples are a little bit more bright and you might be thinking yourself well I love what it's done with the color there but I'm not quite a fan of how dark it's making all these buildings so if you change this to the color blend mode look what happens we get all the beauty of the color because as it says the base layers of luminance values will stay the same and the blend of color or at this point the blend layer being a curves one adjustment layer it's color will apply to the image but not any of the luminance value that we changed on the flip side of that let's change that back to normal if we say okay I love how dark and dingy this is getting it has kind of got that HDR is kind of scary kind of feel to it but I'm not a big fan of the color that's coming through because I wanted to be more eerie well if we change this to luminosity you'll notice that no longer are the colors applying themselves as we do this only the tones are being affected now so we've essentially with our blend modes separated colors and tones from that blending curves adjustment layer let's take this a little bit further this is what the RGB channels selected with your red green and blue channel selected which is essentially what they call your luminance channel and let's go into the greens and let's just bump this up a little bit make it a little bit more green and then let's go into blue and just bring this down and make it a little bit more blue like that okay now if I change this to color watch what happens it applies the color information that hue and saturation information to the base layer but if I change this to luminosity no color is affected at all even though this curves adjustment layer is applying a lot of color to the image it's not affecting the color of the image because it's basically saying okay curves adjustment layer when I have you set to luminosity I only want the tonal values that you're supplying to me apply to my base image if we set it to color it's saying okay curves adjustment layer I don't want you to affect any of the tone in the image I just want you to affect the color in my base image and that's the big major difference between that color and that luminosity blend mode they are actually polar opposites of each other but can be used to separate the data in any of our base layers so now let's take a look at another example let's take a look at what happens when we do this with a gradient map now a gradient map is a great tool to use to give your image a nice wash of color typically it's best used with the color blend mode but when we do this I'll show you what's happening with our color blend mode and our luminance blend mode and it might make even more sense now even looking beyond the curves adjustment layer so we're going to go ahead and add a gradient map and what a gradient map does is it actually maps out the tones in your image we're basically telling this gradient map to make all of our black areas on our image this color blue ok and now we're going to tell it to make all of the white areas in our image let's make it a wild like this color red and we'll press ok now this is probably not the kind of gradient map that I would ever add to any of my images but it lets us see what happens when this is set to normal it's basically saying anything white in this image we need it to be this color red transitioning into the darkest areas of our image being this color blue that's what the normal blend mode set but when we change that blend mode to color watch what happens we're telling our blend layer which is this gradient map to put the color onto our base layer but allow the luminance value of our base layer to show through watch what happens when we change this to luminosity it's going to look bad again but it doesn't actually show color information thinking well why is that well that's because what we're doing is we're applying the tonal values of that color red the tonal values of that color blue but we're allowing the hue and saturation of what's underneath to show through if we were to go in here and we were to change this color red to a lighter color you'd start to see how things are a little bit different it's not actually changing the color of things though it's taking what tonal value this color pink would be so because the total value this color pink is actually more light very light gray almost white it doesn't really show much of a difference but when we change it to this color or this value of red it's actually a much darker representation but the main thing you have to ask yourself here is what am i applying to what so because I really want these colors to apply themselves to the image my best bet is not to change this to luminosity because I don't really like the luminance values that are being applied with that color red and that color blue to the hue and saturation of the base image I'm much better off with something like the color blend mode because I'm applying color to my base and we aren't just stuck there okay you can drop the opacity on this down to I don't know like you know the twenty twenty percent so it's not a huge increase on uncolored on that image okay but it does make a difference so to wrap this all up typically I will apply my gradient maps with the color blend mode because I like the colors that they put on to my image but I will come in and I will use a curves adjustment layer and I will modify the tones of my image specifically only using luminosity so that the colors don't change unless I'm using a curves adjustment layer for some type of color type effect I'm typically using those curves adjustment layers with luminosity and I'm using my gradient maps with color because when I modify that tone curve it allows me to say okay I want this to be a tone curve not a color curve so I want you to think about that because this tone curve can specifically be for tone when you say I only want you to adjust the luminance values by making this luminosity blend mode if you're in Adobe Camera Raw or something like Lightroom and you modify that tone curve guess what it's modifying the tone and the color of the image and it cannot be separated with your color or your luminosity blend mode so I know blend modes can actually be really tricky to get the handle of but if you consult with the help X Adobe calm blog they do a really good job of breaking down those blend modes I actually refer to it very often when I'm trying to look at the difference between blend modes and what's happening to my images and I highly suggest that you do the same thing the main takeaways here though is to think about the fact that color and luminosity are actually polar opposites of each other there are completely different blend modes because the color blend mode allows you to take the color from the blend layer apply it to the base layer but let the base layers luminance values show through the opposite is true for the luminosity blend mode the luminosity blend mode allows you to apply the tones of the blend layer but keep the hue and saturation the same of the base layer to show through so they're kind of polar opposites and some of them work better than others with the different types of adjustment layers that you can use as I mentioned here I love using a tone curve with luminosity and I love using gradient maps with the color blend mode so again my name is Blake Brutus with f64 Academy if you like this please comment on it share it and tell a friend because these blend modes can be kind of tricky to understand but once you get them that's the level of mastery that you can get to in Photoshop it's absolutely incredible thanks again and have a great day [Music] [Music]

Channel: f64 Academy

Views: 47,695

Keywords: Photoshop, Blake Rudis, f.64 Academy, Blend Modes, Color Blend Mode, Luminosity Blend Mode, Luminosity

Id: zkMf9Y1qqRw

Length: 10min 22sec (622 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 06 2017