Architecture Presentation Essentials: Blending Modes and their Examples | Adobe Photoshop

1. Trailer: Hello, everyone. This is r Pa Sabo. I want to warmly welcome you to this class about all the blending modes in photoshop and many of their applications. It is one of the necessary things you need to know to create beautiful, creative images. At the end of this class, you will be able to add different features to your image, like a flock of birds, snow, stars, even tattoos. Fire flames or sparkles without any selection or cutting out in just 5 seconds, fast and easy. Also, you can add tons of magnificent color effects to make your scene more artistic. Or if you are a stage artist, you can add dirt, cracks, textures, or even your logo to your image. And make your renders more realistic. There are a lot. I really can't tell all of them now. Just stay with us and see by yourself. For your assignments, I prepared about 100 cool photographs so you can practice on them, mix them and blend them to create creative fuzzers. Also, you can download the brief definitions of the blending modes and the shortcuts used in this class from the projects and resources staff below this video. In the first step, I want to tell you quickly about the general basics of blending mode. I believe you should know them before beginning, and after that, I'm going to show you all the blending modes one by one and their applications with really fun examples. Let's jump into it. 2. Introduction to Blending Modes: Introduction to blending modes. The first question is, what is blending? I will try to tell you as simple as possible. Blending is how the colors of two layers or to be more accurate, the pixels of two layers can be seen together as one result image. It's how we want to mix colors of the upper layer with the base layer. There are 27 different blending modes and they do different things. Sometimes we only want to see the bright colors of the above image or darker colors of it. Or maybe we want to add some contrast to our image. We can use blending modes to do them and much more. But don't worry about the giant scary number 27, because photoshop has categorized the blending modes into six groups. Just by looking at the list, you will find out what you need. Here are the blending modes. If you click on it, you can see them. As you see, they are divided into six groups by these thin lines. The six groups are normal, darken, lighten, contrast, inversion, and components. With that said, let's start with the first and easiest group, the normal group. 3. Normal Modes: In the normal group, the first blending mode is normal. Actually, normal is the default blending mode. It's obvious that we usually use this one. The other one in this group is dissolve. In contrast to normal, we don't use this one a lot, but I show you quickly what it is. When I click on it, nothing happens. It's a normal blending mode. But if I decrease the opacity, can you see some random pixels from the upper image are gone. The lower the opacity, the less pixels of our image can be seen. But trust me, you will not use this one, 99% of the times. But you can use it as a blending mode for your brushes. Decrease the opacity a little bit, and you can have some cool effects like this. Then you can select the layer, go to filters, blare and hit the Gaussian blare to have this dust like effect. 4. Darken Modes: The second and third group which are so useful are darken and lighten, which are exactly the opposite of each other. The result in the darken group is always darker. Whenever we use darken blending mode for two layers, photoshop compares two layers pixel by pixel and shows the darker pixels as a result. Conversely, after comparing lighting blending mode, show the brighter pixels of both layers, and the result will always be a brighter image at the end. This is a picture that I'm going to explain blending modes on it. This is our base layer. For your better understanding, I prepared this gradient from white to black. It's our blending layer on top of our base. I'm going to try different blending modes on this layer. 100% brightness is white, and 0% brightness is the lack of light, which means black. The first one in this group is darken and it does what all dark and blending modes do. You can see here that the whites are invisible in the results because they are brighter than everything, and also the black areas are shown without any changes because nothing is darker than black. The next blending mode is multiply, which is so popular. It's simply the stronger version of darken. See, this area got really darker. Again, the result is a darker version of our base layer. The third one is the color burn. This one is darker than the previous one and also more saturated, but this one doesn't affect 100% black or white areas. Can you see this red roof here so saturated. It's similar to burn tool. The next one is linear burn, which is less saturated than color burn and darker than multiply. The last one is darker. The difference between darken and darker color is this. Darker color looks at the mixture of GB and compares two layers, but darken looks at them separately. It's harsher. Now, it's example time. Whenever you want to add some silueds to your image and don't have time for extracting images and cutting them out, you can easily use these blending modes. Let's add some cracks to this ball and maybe some dark to this one and a flock of birds in the sky, like a piece of cake. 5. CG Art: We got this gorgeous building here. I want to add some stucco texture to this wall and some dirt under this thin edge. I find this quality picture. I press Control A, Control C, and go back to my scene. Control V to paste it. Click Okay. Now, I hold shift to save the ratio while making it smaller. Okay. Now, if you are still on transformation mode, right click on the image and choose the sort to fix the perspective. Okay. Now, change the blending mode to darken. Or maybe multiply is a better choice. Yes, it is. Now go to adjustment layers and select curves because we want to make some contrast here. Click this pattern to apply curves just to this layer. Now, create an S shaped curve to increase the contrast. It will darken the dark areas and lighten the lighter areas. Now, for this edge, I found a good dirt picture here. Again, I copy and paste it on our scene by Control C and Control. Just click Okay, if you saw this. Like the stoco picture, change the size and position. You can zoom in and out by holding alt and scrolling. Change the perspective with right clicking and choosing the distort option. Press inter when you are done. Duplicate this layer by holding control alt and dragging it by your mouse. Very good. Select the two layers, press control E to merge them. I don't like these two white areas. I'm going to make them dry like other places with a stamp tool right here. Hold alt and click on dirt. Be sure that your brush has soft edges and paint the white areas easily, and the other one. Now, don't worry about its gray color. We will fix it. But first, change the blending mode to darken. And again, go to adjustment layers and add a curve adjustment. Click this button to apply the effects only to one layer. Another way to do that is to hold out and click on the line between the target layer and the adjustment layer. There you go. Now increase the contrast just like we did earlier. All right. So how about adding some birds to the sky? This picture is perfect because it already has a white background. So after moving and resizing it, just change the blending mode to darken. To make it more realistic and get rid of this rectangle shape of birds, I add a mask layer and remove some of the birds with a black brush. Much better. Let's see the before and after. 6. Tattoo (Example): One other cool thing that you can do with the darken layer is to add a tattoo. You need to find a picture with a white background, copy and paste it by control C and control. Change the blending mode to multiply. Precise it, hot to keep the ratio. A little bit of rotation. Okay, so nice. To make it more realistic and more blended with the skin, right click on the tattoo layer and select blend options. Or you can just double click on the layer. Now, hold alt and move this slider to the right. Again, for the other one, hold alt and move it to the left, just like this and heat. Look at it, so nice and natural. 7. Make Up (Example): To improve make or add makeup to your portrats create a new layer from down here, change the blending mode to multiply. Let's start with Mascara. So choose black color. Select the brush, make sure the opacity is low and paint under lashes. Make the brush smaller and continue. Now, choose a natural pink. Make your brush bigger. Put the opacity on about 10%, there are some eye shadow here. Maybe some colors on the cheek. You can also make the lips darker. 8. Lighten Modes: As I told you before, this group is exactly the opposite of the darken. The result image is always brighter. The first one is lighten and compares layers and finally shows brighter pixels as a result. As you see, this area turned to white completely, but the area remained unchanged. The second one in this group is a screen, which is a strong version of lighten. Look, even 10% brightness lighten this zone. The next one is color dodge. Color dodge lightens the image and leaves the 100% black areas black and adds saturation just like the dodge to. This area has become saturated, but still dark woods have remained. However, if you choose linear dodge, it brightens everything even those woods here. Lighter color is the same as lighten, but it looks at the GV channel as a whole, and the result is again so harsh. 9. Fire Sparkles (Example): This group of blending modes is incredible for adding lights, sparkles, candles, and so on. Also, it's my favorite one. Look at this beautiful family picture. It's beautiful already, but you can make it even better. I have a beautiful image of fire here. I copy and paste it on my scene, move it and it. Change the blending mode to. Or a screen or color Dudge. Color Dudge looks cool because it's saturated. But again, I'm going with lighten. Can you see the sparkles? You can also add some fireworks like this, but it doesn't make any sense. 10. Glittery Girl (Example): My favorite thing to do with light and blending mode is to add glitter to everything like this girl's white tissue. You know what to do. Bring the image and resize it. Remember, the sparkles should be seen very small. Now, Dublicate the glitters to cover her T shirt. Now, select all of the glitter layers and press control E to merge them. Then change the blending mode to light them or screen. And now add a mask layer and paint the extra glitter with a black brush. You can change the brush size by holding control alt and the right mouse button and moving the mouse to left and right. Masking will take a while, but the result is totally worse. 11. Red Dress (Example): It's similar to previous examples. I want to add some candles and sparkles in her hands. I chose this picture. I copy and paste it. Change the size. Press inter. Change the blending mode to light them. Duplicate it by holding control and dragging it. I want to mirror it. I press control T to turn on the transformation and mirror it like this. Fix the position. Now, let's add some sparkles. This picture seems nice. Bring it on your scene and change the blending mode to iden. I don't want this big shiny circle in the center, so I will erase it by clone stamp. Choose it. Hold out and click somewhere with a good amount of sparkles and now paint the shiny circle. Very nice. Now, I want to add some other shiny thing to her hands. Maybe the round lights. Paste it, control tea and rotate it. Make sure it's in a good size. Change the blending mode to lighten. Rotate it a little more. I don't want to see that line now. We can erase the light that is on her hand, so it can seem like the light is between her hands. Add a mess layer, take a tiny black brush and remove the lights that are on her fingers. Zoom out by holding old and scrolling down, so beautiful. 12. 5 Second Examples: Here are some five second examples to show you the ability of light and groups and also increase your creativity. Photo. About love. Both. Both 13. Contrast Modes: The next group is the contrast group, which is a mixture of lighten and darken groups. I mean, this group generally darkens the dark colors and lightens the bright colors. They do not affect 50% grays, so actually they increase the contrast. Let's look at our example image one more time. I'm going to show you one of the useful contrast blending modes, which is also the first in this category overlay. Please pay attention to the 50% gray area. It remained unchanged, but the darker parts became darker and brighter parts became brighter. A good place to use overlay is applying it to levels or care adjustments to increase the contrast of a photo like this. The next blending mode is soft light, which is the weaker version of overlay. It creates less contrast comparing to overlay. Again, the third one in this group, hard light is the fading version of overlay. Linar lights and vivid lights are the same. They both are combination of linear dude and linear burn. As a result, they increase the contrast and saturation. But vivid light doesn't affect black and white areas while linear burn does. Again, the next one pin light is a combination of darker color and lighter color. Hard mix is really intense because it reduces colors to just eight colors. The resulting image loses a lot of details and the colors can only be black, white or any of the six primary colors like red, green, blue, son, magentle or yellow. Hard mix is one of the eight special blending modes that act differently in case of feel and opacity. In this case, if you decrease the feel, you can have more than eight colors in the end. To add colorful effects to your images, you can create a new layer. Paint it with a gradient tool. Change the blending mode to overlay and here you go. 14. Introduction to Colors: Let me tell you a little about the language of colors in photoshop before starting two other groups. As you may know, photoshop works with the RGB system, red, green, and blue. By mixing all of them, you will have white. Green and red create yellow. Green and blue creates cyan. Red and blue create magentle. Now, if you open color picture in photoshop, you can see there are some color characteristics. H is for hue, which is simply the color that the color is. The unit is degree and you can change the number 0-360. It's a degree because it's taken from the RGB color heel and every degree shows one specific color. For example, zero is for red, and if I type 180 here, you will have the opposite color of red, which is son in color. The second one in the color pure section is S, which is for saturation. It's a percentage 0-100, just like the third one, which is brightness. By decreasing saturation, the color will lose its pigments. By changing the saturation, you can make different tones of the color and zero saturation is just gray, and increasing the third one brightness is like mixing it with black to make the colors shades. Zero brightness is black. Below these three important characteristics of color, you will find RGB. All the colors can be made by mixing these three main colors. Their number can be changed 0-255. For better understanding, let's look at red in the color picture. H zero, which means red in the color wheel, Brightness, 100%, saturation, 100%, R 255 G, zero, B, zero. Now, listen carefully. I want to change the green number to 255. What do you think the result will be a mixture of green and red. Yes, you nailed it if you said yellow. You don't need to memorize it. You can quickly find it out by photoshop. So that was all the basic information you need to know about colors for now. Let's start difference blending modes. 15. Inversion Modes: This group of blending modes is used for finding the difference between the pixels of the layers. The first and the most useful one in this category is difference. It's best use is for aligning two similar pictures. For example, when you want to create an HDR photo manually. But now, let me show you the math behind it with an example. I have two layers here. In one of them, I have a red circle and on the other one, I have this purple circle. Look at RGB values of this purple in color picture. R is 155 G is 100 and B is 200. Now, I put this circle above the red one and change the upper layers blending mode two difference. Now, let's see what happened with color pure. Pick this new blue color. R is 100, G is 100 and B is 200. What happened? This blending mode finds the difference between color channels and creates new pixels by them. You see, for the red channel, 255 -155 is 100 and the difference between 100. Zero in the green channel is 100 and for blue channel, 200 minus zero is 200. It just finds the difference. We don't have any minus numbers in photoshop. I hope you get it. Whenever you duplicate the image and change the upper one to difference blending mode, it turns black because there is no difference. If you move it, you can see the difference. Let's check out our gradient. Color white inverts the color because white is R G B 255. It's like when you try control in one layer. Black is R G B zero, so it doesn't change anything. Other colors may darken the result. Exclusion is very similar to difference. I don't want to tell you about the mass behind it, but remember, like the previous one, white inverts the colors and black doesn't change anything, but 50% gray will turn the result to 50% gray. Subtract subtracts the values of colors. If you pay attention to our two circles again, we will find out. We have R 255 g0b0 in the first circle, top of it, we have this purple circle with R 155 G 100 B 200. If I change the blending mode to subtract, the result is this dark red brown shape. Take the numbers, 255 -155 is 100, zero -100 is -100. We don't have negative numbers, so it's zero now. Zero -200 is -200. Again, zero. In general, black has zero effect, and when the plan layers brightness gets brighter, does the result get darker? The last one in this group, divide produces the opposite effect of subtract. White has no effect. When the blend layers brightness get darker, does the result get brighter? They can remove color casts by this blending mode. For example, in this picture, everything has turned a little brownish. This area should be white. Click to pick its color and go to adjustment layers and click on solid color. Click Okay. Now, change the layers blending mode to divide. Look at the before and after. Extra brown color is gone. 16. Component Modes: In the last group, you can see components of the colors. So by selecting them, you can choose which one of the characteristics of the pixels you want to preserve from your bland layer. They are color, saturation, and luminacity. If I choose color, only and only the color will be applied in the results, not the saturation nor the luminacity. For example, in this picture, I will create another blank layer on top of it. I change the blending mode to saturation. Now I take a saturated color like red. And paint on this new layer. You can see only the saturation will be applied to the result. In this group, color and he are very useful to paint the monochrome images or sometimes change the color of things. In this picture for now, let me change this blue dome to red. 17. Special Ones and Popular Ones: These eight blending modes act differently with feel and opacity. Don't forget to try them when applying them. And these are the famous ones that you use them way more than others. These blending modes are exactly opposite to each other. 18. Assignments: Congratulations on finishing this class. You did a great job. As I told you earlier, I have prepared about 100 awesome pictures that you can blend together and create fun creative posters. So check them out and share the results with us. Ask me any questions you have and I happily answer. See you in the next class and buy for now.