From the course: Photoshop 2020 Essential Training: Design

Using blend modes to unify images - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2020 Essential Training: Design

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Using blend modes to unify images

- [Instructor] Photoshop has a lot of different blend modes, but, when compositing images together, there are four that I find to be most useful, multiply, screen, overlay, and soft light. First, let's take a look at multiply. So the multiply blend mode multiplies the top layer, whatever layer you're blending, with the layers underneath, and the resulting color will always be darker. In addition, white will disappear. So let's view this edge file, and I'll change the blend mode to multiply. So in this case I retain the black edges, but the center, that white paper, is going to disappear. And of course this isn't just for edge effects. You could use the blend mode when you're trying to overlay pencil drawings or these birds that we'll take a look at in just a moment. Now, I actually don't want dark edges, I want light edges. So I'll return to normal, then use the keyboard shortcut Command + I on Mac or Control + I on windows in order to invert the layer. So now it looks like I have black paint on white paper. Now I'll change the blend mode to screen because screen is basically the inverse of multiply. I'm going to keep the whites and the black will disappear. But there are a number of shades of gray, actually, in that black area, and I want to remove them. So from the bottom of the layers panel, I will add a curves adjustment layer and then click this icon on the properties panel in order to create a clipping mask to clip the curve so that it only affects the edge layer. Then I'll start moving over the black point slider, pushing those values to black, and since black disappears in the screen blend mode, I no longer have that texture that I didn't want. All right, let's take a look at the eclipse layer. I'll make it visible, but I want to drop out all of the black. So, again, from the layers panel, I'll choose screen as my blend mode, and then I can use the move tool in order to reposition it within the image. Then we'll look at the birds, and, again, this is a great candidate for multiply. So I'll select that from the list, but we can see that the sky wasn't purely white and I've got this line right here as well as up the left hand side. So to remove that, I'll add another curves adjustment layer. Then from the properties panel, click in order to create a clipping mask, and move the white slider over to the left, pushing these values to pure white so that they disappear in the image. I might also want to target the bird layer, add a layer mask, tap the B key to select my paintbrush, use the right bracket key to get a little bit larger of a brush, and then just paint with black around the edges in order to remove some of those birds that are either close to or outside of the edge. Excellent. Now, when I'm trying to layer different textures or maybe change the light a little bit, I'm going to switch to either the overlay or soft light mode. I'll toggle the visibility of the cloudy day, here, and I'm just adding this to change the light over the entire image to kind of add a little bit of mottling. So I'll choose normal, and we'll take a look at overlay versus soft light. In this case, I like the harsher overlay. It's adding a little bit more contrast. So I'll select that, and, if it's too harsh, we can just decrease the opacity a little. Now, it's a little bit odd that this scene now has two different suns in it. So if I wanted to I could tap the J key and, with the healing brush, I'll just remove that second sun. Finally, let's look at the texture layer. I want to add that. So we'll look at either overlay, seems a bit too harsh, or soft light. I prefer soft light. In fact, I might even tone that down a little bit using the opacity and setting it to 80%. So there you go, multiply, screen, overlay, and soft light.

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