Working With Color in Adobe Photoshop

4.3 Controlling Color With Blending Modes

Hello, everybody, welcome back to working with color in Photoshop. This is lesson 4.3, where we take a look at working with blending modes. Generally when we use the term blending mode in Photoshop, we're referring to the blending modes of individual layers. Blending modes do appear in several other places, but the default place, and the assumed place of the term is being used at the layer level. Blending modes are found in this drop down box at the top of the layers panel. The default value is normal which essentially means no blending. Before we begin exploring what the different blending modes are and what to expect from them, I want to point out that I am currently working on a layer that has a series of color bars going from black, mid-tone grey and white, a gradient from black to white, and then all the different colors, just so we can get a good idea of what these blending modes do. So if we open up that blending mode menu, we can see several groupings of blending modes here. The top one is Normal and Dissolve. I'm gonna be honest with you. In nearly twenty years of using Photoshop, I've never really used the Dissolve mode for anything beneficial. The first real set of useful modes is the Multiply set. Even though Multiply is the second one on the list, it goes underneath Darken. This set of blending modes focuses on the darker values within the layer. So if we set it to Darken, it's only gonna show the tones within the layer that is darker than the tones that are underneath it. Most commonly we use the Multiply, which will take the pixel colors that are underneath this layer, and multiply them with the pixel colors that are in the layer. Most notably, it makes white tones completely disappear. You'll notice that this white area over here in these color bars, is entirely invisible. And the rest of the group does something similar, just with a slightly different mathematical algorithm. The second set is the Screen or the lightened set. It does the opposite of what the Multiply set does. It focuses on the lighter pixels within the layer. If we set it to Screen, it's blending the light values of the layered pixels with the pixels that are underneath it. Most notably, it makes the black tones disappear. The third set is the Overlay, which does the exact middle, right in between the Multiply and this green. So with the Overlay set, the mid-tone grays are completely gone, but all the rest of the pixels are blending in with the pixels underneath it. So that's the best way to think about these three main sets of blending modes. The first set makes white disappear, the second set makes black disappear, and the third set makes mid-tones disappear. The fourth set is usually used for mathematical type of operations. With the Difference, Exclusions, Subtract, and Divide. Sometimes you can find some very interesting artistic effects in there, but it's not really what they're intended to do. The last set are almost more forensically oriented, in that you blend with the Hues, and the Saturations, the Color, and Illuminosity. The best way to really, the best way to really understand what these sets do is to look at the Color mode. Now in our illustration here we see this bottom color bar, we get an overlay of those individual colors with the background. But notice that we get this gradient and the black, white, and gray bar has no change at all because there's no real color being represented in those. So it's being rendered as just a flat tone gray. Likewise, if you go to Luminosity, you get sort of the opposite of that. It removes the color. And it just blends in with the luminous values of the layer that we're working on. We do see some change within this bottom color bar because each of those colors do have a slightly different luminous value to it. But after saying all that, the ones you you need to focus on are really the Multiply, Screen, and Overlay sets. So let's talk a little bit about how blending modes are useful when working with color and other compositing tricks within Photoshop. I have this shot here of this water splash that I intentionally shot with a bright light on the water and a black background, because I know I wanted to use blending modes to control this. If we pull this over and layer it on top of our image here, it would take a lot of work to try to select and mask out that background to isolate just the water elements. But because that background is solid black, I can use a Screen blending mode and remove it almost entirely. Now I do notice that I do have some residue in there. So then the thing to do is to force more black tones into that layer, through image adjustment levels. We'll take this left-hand slider, and just push it over until we see that background reside almost completely disappear. To that end, I've placed several of these water splash layers in here, so we can create a very energetic, very splashy effect around our model. And the idea now is that I want to colorize these splashes, so that it looks like they're almost taking on the color of the model and they fit into the scene a little bit better. In the source files for this lesson I have these already inserted in here. So you can open up the source file for this and work along with me if you care to. I'm going to open the WaterSplash1 group and then find the water splash layer that's coming off of her hair. That's this one right here. You can see it by toggling the visibility on and off. So now I want to add a solid fill layer directly over this layer. That can be done through the little adjustments layer menu at the base of the Layers panel. You just select Solid Color from the top there. And I'm just gonna leave it at white for right now. And I'm gonna clip it by holding down the ALT or the Option key, and clicking right in between those two layers. So it clips it right to that. Now I know that looks a little bit silly. Let's hide it for the time being. The point I want to make is that we can use this solid fill layer to colorize that splash. Let's double click on that solid fill again and select the color of her hair. Just going through and sampling on one of these areas that you can get a nice blonde tone from her. Reveal that layer again and this time Let's change the blending mode of that solid fill layer to Overlay. Now that's a good start. We can shop through it by tapping the up and down arrow keys to find one that fits well with what we want to accomplish. Linear Burn doesn't look that bad. Neither does Multiply. But I'm gonna keep that in mind and for the time being I'm actually gonna go back to Overlay. I might come back to it later, but I'm gonna do that exact same process to colorize a lot more of these splashes. And here's the result that I ended up with. Notice I didn't color all of them. I just colored some very primary ones coming off of her skin, and then I decided to use a complementary blue color for the background splashes that are behind her. Remember that discussion we had in an earlier chapter about complimentary colors and using the color wheel? That's the information that I used in order to choose what color to use to colorize those background splashes to further make her image stand out even more. In moving our attention then, on to these three little subset images here. In the green set, I do have some ivy growing. Because my thought was that I could use the colors that are being represented here to almost represent some natural elements. The green would be some sorta plant or ivy-looking thing. The red would be fire or smoke. And then the blue could represent wind. So I'm gonna start with the green. I've got a couple of layers in here that look like some sort of ivy or plant life, that I've positioned directly over our little sub-image here. And this one, with all the swirls and everything, that's directly over our model, right now it's on a Normal blending mode and it's obscuring a lot of it. Now watch what happens when we just simply set it to Screen. That looks a lot better. We still see an indication of those green swirls in here. And it bleeds over outside the image, and we see it clearly on top of that black background. Now I think I do actually want to see a little bit going over on top of the red as it bleeds over. So I'm gonna grab this entire green group and pull it up over the red's. Like that. When it comes to working with color, blending modes are extremely useful. I use them all the time in my own personal work. In fact I couldn't imagine working with color in Photoshop without the use of blending modes. Next up, Lesson 4.4, where we take a look at the gradient maps.