Tutorials
Fun with blend modes...
Oct 18th 2005
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More Fun With Blend Modes:
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1.
Prologue
The story of this tutorial began with an E-mail from a visitor to this site showing me a graphic and asking how it was done. I love a good challenge and responded with the graphic to the left. It looks reasonably close to the graphic I was imitating. But the story of how it was done is not a short one. |
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2.
A Texture To Blend
If we're going to do some blending, we'll need two images to put together. Here's one. In my tutorial, Creating a Random Texture, I created the texture to the left. In several of the examples here, I'm going to use this as either the "Blender" or "Blendee" in a pair of images. If you'd like to know how it was made, check out that other tutorial. |
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3.
Layer Blend Modes
To obtain the effect we saw in step 1 above, I placed the texture you saw on a layer above the anime character image. With the layer with the texture active, I chose the Hard Light option from the Blend Mode pop-up menu on the Layers palette. Then, so the texture wasn't too overpowering, I set its opacity slider to 52%:
Blend Modes affect how the pixels in one layer interact with those of another. There's quite a few and we'll look at some of them here. In the case of Hard Light, how it behaves depends on your image. I my case, it left the extreme values of my texture alone and let the artwork show through in the gray areas.
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4.
Variations...
Let's get some terms straight: The Blend Image is the one higher up in the layer order and set to a mode other than Normal blending (in this case, the anime artwork.) The Base Image is the one set to Normal blending (in this case our texture.) The Resulting Image is the product of the two in combination (the large image at right.)
Here's what I did at left: I tried reversing the order of the images (having the art on top with the same blend mode as step 3 above.)
Blend Image
(artwork; on top)= 100% opacity
Blend Mode = Hard Light
Base Image
(texture; on bottom)= 100% opacity
Blend Mode = Normal |
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5.
A Pleasure To Burn
Here's a very cool variation on the one you saw above. After selecting the texture Base Image, I chose Image: Adjust: Hue/ Saturation. With Colorize checked, I gave my grayscale texture a red-orange hue:
Now it looks as if our character is behind flames. Wow!
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6.
Speaking of Fire...
Here's what I did at left:
Blend Image
(artwork; on top)= 100% opacity
Blend Mode = Color Burn
Base Image
(texture; on bottom)= 100% opacity
Blend Mode = Normal
Color Burn is another Blending Mode to experiment with. It darkens the colors of the blended pixels and gave us the resulting image to the right. The only case where pixels were not darkened, is where white was blended with white, such as in the eye. The overall effect makes our guy look considerably more evil, don't you think?. |
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7.
Bird Of Prey
I want to try the texture out on a photographic image and see what we can get.Here's what I did at left:
Blend Image
(photo; on top)= 100% opacity
Blend Mode = Color Dodge
Base Image
(texture; on bottom)= 69% opacity
Blend Mode = Normal
Color Dodge lightens the colors in our image. The only places there has been no color lightening are in the pure black areas of the texture. |
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8.
Two Photographs
Let's see what effects we can get by blending two photos together. You know, if you get the right two images, you can get some amazing composite effects in just a few seconds, that will lead the uneducated to believe you did hours of masking or selections.
Hey, thanks, Photoshop!Here's what I did at left:
Blend Image
(eyes; on top)= 78% opacity
Blend Mode = Multiply
Base Image
(flame; on bottom)= 100% opacity
Blend Mode = Normal
Multiply is always a safe choice when in doubt. It, uh, multiplies the base image's color by the blend image's color on a pixel level. To understand a lot of the blend modes you have to be comfortable with the idea of attaching numerical values to colors (white = 255, & black = 0) We'll get back to this later... Multiplying should always produce a darker color in the resulting image. You might want to think of it as layering two pieces of colored acetate. Or you might not. |
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9.
Again!
When you're using Photoshop you've got to explore at least a few of the many alternatives. I know I sound like a broken record sometimes, but there are so many variables to consider, that the possible outcomes of your work are nearly infinite. There's the choice of Blend Image, the Base Image, the Opacity settings, and the Blending Modes settings. Quick somebody do the calculations for me. When you add in other possible image treatments like color adjustments or filters, the possibilities are mind boggling!
Here's what I did this time:
Our old friend Hard Light is back here. If my candle image were grayscale it would have behaved as in example #3 above. Since it's in color, in the darkest areas the Blending is multiplying most of the darker values and screening, or lightening the colors in the lighter values. The wild card is some of the interesting hue changes we get in the middle range of our blend image.Blend Image
(eyes; on top)= 78% opacity
Blend Mode = Hard Light
Base Image
(flame; on bottom)= 100% opacity
Blend Mode = Normal |
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10.
What A Difference!
Here's what I did for this variation:
Blend Image
(eyes; on top)= 100% opacity
Blend Mode = Difference
Base Image
(flame; on bottom)= 100% opacity
Blend Mode = Normal
Difference is so aptly named that it's an easier mode to understand. It subtracts whichever color has a darker value from whichever one has a lighter value. It could be either the blend color from the base color or the base color from the blend color; resulting in some of the wild hues you see. It may be easier to understand this way: If my candle image were solid black here, we'd see no change in the blend image. If the candle image were solid white, we'd see a negative, or inverted version of the eyes.
One thing I'm really not getting into here are the advanced blending options you have. If you double click the Blend Image layer, you get the Layer Styles dialogue box. In it you can control the Opacity of the blend as well as which Color Channels are affected by the blend mode. This of course gives you even more possibilities for how your image can look, so you can waste even more time trying different channel combinations! |
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11.
Color Your World
Having done a simple outline of the falcon, and filled it with blue and yellow, using a blend mode is a quick way to mix colors in your two images with more than one hue. Here's what I did at left:
Blend Image
(blue/yellow shape; on top)= 47% opacity
Blend Mode = Multiply
Base Image
(bird; on bottom)= 100% opacity
Blend Mode = Normal
Multiply was used above in step # 8. Now maybe it's easier to understand the "overlaid colored acetate" simile I used. You might think by it's name, the blend mode Overlay would be similar. The difference is this: Overlay would keep all the darks and lights of the bird as they are, colorizing only the middle values most & giving us a much brighter resulting image.
I hope this doesn't further confuse you, but if you want a better understanding of the "multiplying" that's going on here, lay down a color sampler and watch numerical values of the color channels in your Info Palette. First look at your Blend Image and Base Image set to Normal blending. Then set the blending mode and see the values in the Resulting Image. Multiplying with a color channel with the value of 0 is just like multiplying with 0 (the product is 0.) Multiplying with a channel with a value of 255 is like multiplying the base color channel by 1. Any channel with a value less than 255 has a "multiplying" value of a percentage of one. (For instance 204 x 107 = 86; because 204 has a "multiplying" value of .8; in other words 204 is 80% of 255.) |
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12.
One Last Blend
Here's what I did at left:
Blend Image
(graphic; on top)= 100% opacity
Blend Mode = Screen
Base Image
(colorized texture; on bottom)= 100% opacity
Blend Mode = Normal
Now that we all understand how the numerical values of color channels factor in (we do; don't we?), you'll have no problem understanding the mode, Screen. Screen is sort of the opposite of multiply. It multiplies the inverse of each channel's color information. The result color is always lighter, so screening with black (as in the negative space in my falcon graphic here) has no effect. As in step #8 above, it looks like I spent a lot of time doing selections to get the transparent effect on my falcon graphic. I didn't. Hey, thanks again, Photoshop! |
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13.
Team Actions
Time for an ad. If you really want to see some extraordinary examples of the power of blending modes download some of our Actions from this site. I made four sets of Image Actions and many, like the examples here, use blend modes to give you some cool results. Experiment and enjoy! |
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Latest Forums Clone YourselfThat is quit nice. But I think that can be more easy to do.. |
