From the course: Photoshop CC 2017 One-on-One: Advanced

Normal and Dissolve - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop CC 2017 One-on-One: Advanced

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Normal and Dissolve

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- [Narrator] Alright, so here we are looking at what I'm calling the 27 Common Blend Modes inside Photoshop. And they appear in many locations in the program, but most obviously here in the upper left corner of the layers panel. Starting with normal and ending with luminosity. And we are going to work through these modes in order. Starting with normal and dissolve. Now technically, normal's not a blend mode, in fact, it's a lack of any blend mode because it involves no special math. Whereas, dissolve goes ahead and dithers the transparency. And let me show you what that looks like. I'll go ahead and switch over to this example right here, which we're going to end up turning in to this final effect. And so, just by the way of demonstration I'm going to click on the sign layer, here in the layers panel and I'm going to create a new layer by pressing control shift n or command shift n on a Mac and I'll just go ahead and call this layer Black. And I'll press the enter key or the return key on a Mac to accept that layer. Alright, now I'm going to switch from the rectangular marquee tool to the elliptical marquee and I'm just going to draw a big old elliptical selection like so. And I'll press alt backspace or option delete on a Mac to fill it with black, assuming that black is your foreground color. Alright, now I'll press control d or command d on a Mac in order to deselect the image and now what I want to do is introduce some translucency in to the layer. So, let me make sure we're all clear on what I mean by that. Opacity, that is something that's fully opaque is going to be utterly and completely impossible to see through. So you're not going to be able to see through an opaque layer, to the layers below. Whereas, if you have transparency in a layer, then you can see through to the underlying layers absolutely. Translucency is anything in between. Something that you can say, halfway see through and to introduce some translucency, I'm going to go up to the filter menu, choose blur and then chose Gaussian blur. And I'm going to take this value up to a whopping 100 pixels and then press the enter key or the return key on a Mac. Alright, now if I zoom in you can see that we have a gradual drop off from the opaque portion of the layer to the transparent portion. And anywhere in between we're seeing the soft transitions. That's a function of having the blend mode set to normal. But, if we were to switch to the dissolve mode instead, then we would end up with this dithering effect, in which every pixel is either 100% opaque or 100% transparent but we just have fewer and fewer opaque pixels as we go out to the end of the blur. Now, dissolve also produces these dithering effects when we introduce lower opacity values. So, for example, if I switch to the white layer right there and I change its blend mode to dissolve. You can see that we end up with these ratty edges, where otherwise we would have some smoothing in the form of anti-aliasing. But the effect becomes even more pronounced if I press the five key to reduce the opacity value to 50%, in which case, roughly half of the pixels are opaque and the other half are transparent. We see even more transparent pixels if I introduce a lower opacity value. So, this is how things look at an opacity of 30%. We see more opaque pixels if I introduce a higher opacity value, such as 70%. And incidentally, I'm just changing the opacity value by tapping a number key. So, just by way of a reminder, if I press the three key, I get 30%. If I press the seven key, I get 70% and if I press two keys in a row, such as 5, 5, then I would get 55%. Alright, now let's say that I want to switch back to the normal mode. You have another keyboard shortcut that's available to you, which you may find useful especially on the PC because notice if I just switch to the normal mode manually, then the blend mode option gets stuck. And again, this is just a PC thing, but it will interrupt my ability to, for example, change the opacity value. So, if I press the zero key, nothing happens. Instead I have to press the escape key, in order to deactivate the blend mode option and then press the zero key, in order to instate an opacity value of 100%. So, you may find it helpful to switch between blend modes from the keyboard and the simplest method is to press shift plus or minus. So, let me go ahead and take the opacity value back down to 50%, so we can see what's going on. If I press shift plus, I will advance to the next blend mode which is dissolve. If I press shift minus, then I'll go back to the previous blend mode, which in this case is normal. So again, that's shift plus to move forward and you can move through all the blend modes this way, by the way. Or shift minus, to move backwards. Ultimately, getting all the way back to normal. And that's how you take advantage of the first two options in the blend mode pop up menu, normal and dissolve, both of which use no special math and the only difference is that dissolve dithers translucency.

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