Lessons

Lesson Info

Layer Blending Modes in Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop has a really interesting feature known as blending modes. It's a menu, a really long menu of choices that you're gonna find. Whenever you use a paintbrush tool, you'll find it in retouching tools and you'll even find it at the top of your layers panel and it controls how two things are either gonna combine or somehow semi blend together and it can be used to do all sorts of creative and fun things or practical things. But it's a feature where I find few people really have a good sense for uh what it's used for and how to understand them. So we're gonna explore it. But when I do, I'm not gonna explain every single blending boat that's in the menu. What you're gonna find is the menu is organized into different sections and it's more important to know why they're in sections. What's unique about each one of those sections. And therefore, if you know a good use for each of the sections, then you can use all the modes that are found within that section for the same purpose. Now, y...

ou'll, it'll make more sense when I get into it. So let's explore blending modes in Photoshop. When you grab a tool that is capable of changing the look of your image by painting, you're gonna usually find that up here in the settings for that tool. There'll be a pop up menu called mode that should be called blending mode because that's the official name for that menu. When I click on it, we see the large long list of choices. That same thing is going to be available. If I switch to a retouching tool, same list on some of the tools you might find that there's a more abbreviated list, but it'll still be the same choices, just not as many of them. If I come over here to my layers panel and I work on a layer, gotta make it visible though, then I'm gonna find the same menu here. So let's take a look at what this blunting mode menu can be used for and how to understand what's in it. Well, the first thing is let's look at the way it's divided up into sections. You notice that there's 12345 and it looks like six different sections. Well, this document with the gradient on one layer and just an image on the layer underneath can be used to understand three of those sections. Let's start with the section that begins with darken. What darken will do is take the layer that's currently active and make it only show up where it's darker than what's underneath. So when I set it to darken any area on this layer that's brighter than what's underneath will simply disappear. And I'll see the layer that's underneath instead. So let's try it out. There's darken mode. The second mode that's in there is known as multiply mode, multiply mode is gonna act like ink. And so let me put this back to normal and think about how would you print this using ink? Well, the way that you make white when you're printing with ink is you just leave the piece of paper alone. You don't put any ink down at all. And therefore over here, I'm gonna see the normal version of the picture that's underneath. Then right here, let's say there's 5% black in there. Well, all it's gonna do is add 5% black ink to the image that's underneath when we're over here and we have 50% gray. Well, that's 50% ink coverage and it's just gonna add that much ink to the image that's underneath. So let's change this to the choice called multiply multiply acts like ink. Then we have other modes that are in here. But let's just figure out what's common about all of them. So we know why they're grouped together. So to figure that out, first watch what happens to white in each one of those modes, just look at this end and see if you see anything consistent. Here's darken, here's multiply color burn linear burn in darker color. With all of those, you should notice the far right edge of the photograph is not really changing. And that's because in all of those modes, white simply disappears, then anything that's darker than white has the potential of doing only one thing to the image that's underneath. And what that is is darken it in no situation. Will this be able to brighten what's underneath? And you might think that when you're in darken mode, hey, that looks like it brightened up that texture. Now, if you turn off this layer, you'll find that this texture in here was actually a little bit brighter than what's in there. It's just not always blatantly obvious. So what is common about all these is they're only capable of darkening a photograph and white disappears when we use it. And so we'll figure out uses for that. Let's give it a try. Well, here I have what could look like a layer mask could be its contents and let's say what I wanted to do is grab my paintbrush tool and I would like to select this color and I need to paint in here. Well, when I paint in there, it just replaces what is already there. That's how brushes usually work. But if I want to change the way my brush interacts with this, I can go up here to the top of my screen and I'm gonna set this to darken mode in darken mode all it can do is darken the picture, it cannot brighten it. And therefore, when I paint over this area that already has black in it, it's unable to brighten up that black. And so I'm able to paint over this area easily without replacing what's there. And sometimes that can be really useful over here. Maybe I wanna extend this over into this spot with a without getting into too much in the middle. Well, I grab that color to paint with and I start going over there. And so I'm able to paint across this area and not affect the areas that are darker than the shade that I'm painting with. So I do frequently use it when painting on masks. If I go in and look at the mask and I determine it needs some touch up, then let's say we have this image. This is my sister-in-law Laura and she likes wine because her husband has a uh works for a winery and let's say she wanted to get a tattoo on her arm that relates to that. Well, let's go grab an image that might relate to it. And so let's say she had this drawn up in case that's what she was thinking of using for the art. And so I'm gonna take this and make a selection just out like this only to get rid of the wood that's out here and then we can copy it. I'll close this and then let's paste it in here, but the paper is in there and I don't want it to show up. So what if we were to take this and make it print as if it was using ink? Well, if we did this white sheet of paper would disappear because you don't put any ink down to print white. So let's change this to the choice that is called multiply. Now, the only problem with that is the sheet of paper actually had some darkness to it. It's not actually white and remember white is what disappears in all of those blending modes we were talking about. And so I need to adjust the background on this layer until it becomes solid white and I can just do it after setting that layer to multiply, I'll just come up here and I'll adjust it using levels and in levels this slider here forces areas to white. I'll bring it in just until I can no longer see the color or the brightness I should say of that sheet of paper. Now, if the little marks here for the tattoo design were not dark enough, I could also pull in the leftmost slider to darken that up, but I think it's dark enough, I'll click. OK. And now all we need to do is scale this down. So I'll type command t that's how I usually get to free transform, which is found under the edit menu otherwise, and we'll end up bringing this down like that and I could rotate it a little bit. And if I wanted to, I could even make it so it curves to conform to the curvature of her arm. But we'll cover that kind of stuff in a different lesson that is about warping and bending things. But you can see how multiply mode is helping me here. And if I set it back to normal, how that background would still be there. Now, the other modes that are in that same section, all of them are gonna make um white disappear. But in this case, darken mode not gonna help because her skin gets into a darker area than the tattoo multiply mode works great because it acts like ink. Then we just have other methods here that'll give us similar looking results. And if one of them is too strong, all you gotta do is lower the opacity of the layer and that will lessen uh how much it can affect the image. Let's say I wanna create just a creative image one that looks somewhat like this. This image was created by taking maybe a dozen photographs where I'm not on a tripod. So my camera is moving a little bit in between each shots. Also the subject matter, this is a lifeguard hut with stairs going up and there's somebody at the top they're moving around so you can see this kind of skin tone color here, but it's all really wild in the way it looks. Well, let's do the same thing, but let's do it with these images. Here's one, here's another one and people are just walking around at a tourist place and my camera's not on a tripod. So the buildings are in different positions uh between shots. So let's grab those images and let's stack them, then let's get it. So we combine them together and let's use one of those darkened modes. Now, I'm just gonna select all these layers. I don't have to select the bottom one because the blending mode determines how one layer is gonna interact with what's under it. There's nothing under that layer but it's not gonna hurt it. So I might as well select them all and then I'm gonna change the blending mode and we could try something like darken. It would look weird, but I wanna choose something like multiply and the only thing is multiply is as if now we've printed all these images on an inkjet printer on the same sheet of paper, meaning we printed six images on the same sheet. So imagine how much ink would have been put down. It's like running that sheet of paper through the printer multiple times. So what I'm gonna do then is with all those layers selected, I'm just gonna lower the opacity and that means apply it less. And so I'll back off on it, back off on it and tell. Well, I'm starting to see a checkerboard just to avoid seeing the checkerboard. I'm gonna put a layer on the bottom. I'll put a layer down here where I just do solid color. All I did is click on the adjustment layer icon, which is that half black and half white one. And I'm gonna make a layer full of white. I'll put it at the bottom. Well, didn't mean to turn those off. I meant to click on the name, drag it down there. All right. Now we're not gonna see the checkerboard ever show up. Instead if you could see through this stuff you're gonna see through to the white that's underneath. And I'm just gonna lower the opacity until I don't think it looks too dark. So I'm more like that. And so now we're kind of getting that wild look, but let's say I want the buildings to look more normal and only the people looking odd. Well, I wasn't on a tripod and look at these crosses over here. You see how they don't line up. We could come up here to the edit menu and choose auto align layers and I'll just use default settings and click. OK? And it'll find common things within the image and line them up. So now all the buildings on all these layers, they line up, but the people were moving around and so it couldn't line them up. And so I just might now adjust my opacity a little more to get it just the way I want. And now we got weird looking people. And I also kind of like the way the edge of this looks and that has to do with us using Ottawa Line in that the buildings were in slightly different positions. So I had to move the photos around. So now they only overlap partially over there. But that's another idea. And if I didn't want this version of it, I could select all these. And instead of using multiply, I could try one of these other choices, looks like color burn wouldn't work. But linear burn could and darker color could as well. And it's just a matter of their variations on the same theme because they're all grouped together. So let's get rid of that. I'm not gonna save it and that as well. And let's go back to our simple document. And so far what we learned is that this section here, the reason why all of these are grouped together is because white is going to disappear in that mode. And anything darker than white has the potential of darkening our photo but will never brighten it. And that's why it starts with the mode called darken. And that kind of tells you the theme of all of the modes found within. So now let's look at this grouping, that one starts with lighten mode. And all of these modes in here are opposites of the ones that are found above. So when I choose lighting mode, it's comparing the layer I'm currently working on to what's underneath and only allowing areas that are brighter than what's found underneath to show up. And just like up here in multiply mode acted like ink. Well, the one found just below this is gonna act like the opposite of ink which would be light. So when I set it there, it's gonna brighten it as if all the light that's here is being added to the amount of light that would take to make up this image. It's like um using a projector to project this image on a wall and having a second projector that projects the image that's on top and you just shine them both on the same screen and that's what screen mode does. But then we have these other modes and let's try to figure out what's common about them all. Well, it's the exact opposite of what, what was common about the modes above when the modes above the area over here where white was always disappeared and anything darker than that had the potential of darkening the picture. Well, when it comes to this section, the thing that disappears in every single one of these modes is black. If the layer I'm working on contains black, it will disappear. And the only thing all these modes can do is to brighten or lighten the picture and that's why they're all grouped together. So let's see if we can figure out some uses for that. Well, let's see here. I was pointing my camera out a window and we had some lightning going on and I just kept hitting the shutter, getting more and more lightning and it was really cool. I also got fireworks on a different day. But what I wanna do is combine those together as if all these lightning strikes were captured in a single exposure. So you got them all. Well, let's select those and let's stack them in layers. Now, I wasn't on a tripod. So I moved around. So if I turn off one of these layers, you're gonna find the land is in a different position in each one. So let's use that auto aligned feature. I need to select all the layers and then I can come up here and choose auto aligned layers and just default settings and click. OK. That should find this land because that's pretty consistent in shape and line it up and then we can come in and combine these together by changing the blending mode. I could try to use lighting mode and yeah, that one seems to be pretty darn good. Now, screen mode would not work in this case because screen mode acts like light and that would make it. So the amount of light in the blue sky that's here would add to the amount of light that's in this blue sky, which would add to this one and this one and this one and it would become 12345 times as bright where the sky is. So if I set it to screen, you'll see the sky gets really bright. Now, the only thing I'd really need to do is grab the crop tool and crop this in because when I lined those images, we ended up with a little bit of misalignment at the bottom there. I didn't adjust the top looks like I still need a little bit. But you get the idea, then I could turn each one of these on and off to see how are they contributing to the image? And it'd be kind of cool. I can even animate this. Photoshop has a, a feature called the timeline and I could make like this thing go off like that and then make this go separate. So it looks like a storm. But that is using lighting mode. Let's see if we can figure out something to use for other modes. Well, here I have a picture taken in Paris and the sky is somewhat boring. I wanna liven it up a bit. So what I'd like to do is add lightning or fireworks or both to do. So let's open up that image of Paris and then let's go back and I'm gonna take these three images and I'm gonna stack them on top of each other. The only reason I didn't stack them with the image of Paris is I don't want, if one of these images is larger, I don't want this happening where you just get empty space. So instead I'm gonna select these layers. I got them all. I'll use the move tool and I'm gonna drag them over to that other tab and down here. But had I used that thing called load them in layers. Uh It would have not had the same size photo, it would have had extra space in here. I just didn't feel like dealing with that. Let's turn off these eyeballs. We'll turn them on one at a time. And why don't we first try to add this amount of fireworks? Now in here, this photo down at the bottom, you can see the land. I'm gonna get rid of that. I'll just use the marquee tool to make a selection like this. And I'll hit delete and I should do the same thing with the other fireworks. Turn it on and first gonna move it up because I don't know if it extends beyond, then I'll select that, hit the lead, then let's get the fireworks to show up on our image. So let's pick one to start with. We'll go with this one and I'm gonna move it so you can see the entirety of the firework and then we could try in here uh lighting mode if you wanted to. But the only problem with lighting mode is it might be that the firework isn't always brighter than what's underneath it. So if I move it over here where the actual Eiffel Tower is, the lights from the Eiffel Tower are gonna be brighter and the fireworks just won't show up there. But if I set it instead to screen mode, screen is gonna add the amount of light that's in the fireworks to the amount of light that is in the image underneath. And therefore, it'll always brighten things. And so I'll choose screen mode. The issue now is I can see where the sky ended in that shot. And that's because the sky is not completely black. So I'm gonna adjust that layer. I'm just gonna choose image adjustments levels and in levels, this slider right here forces areas to black. I'm gonna bring it in until I can no longer see the sky show up at all. You can also grab the middle slider and brighten or darken what's left if you wanted to, I'll click. OK. Now, if I end up taking this and I move it, I don't know how much you'll notice, but it is brightening even that tower that's there. What I dislike in this case is the spot right here. But I gotta be careful if I'm gonna retouch this out because it can mess things up when you're using these blending modes. If you want to see what I'm talking about here, I'll try to retouch it out. Uh This is set to sample all layers and that means it's going to copy from this image as if all the layers were merged together and it looked just like you did see on screen. Well, I'll go over here and try to retouch this out. But the problem will be it's going to take that information, retouch it out. And the layer it's gonna end up on over in the layers panel is set a screen mode. So whatever this retouching tool deposits there, it's gonna think it's made out of light and that doesn't look right because it copied a color like in the sky. And it didn't realize that layer is set a screen mode. And so that little retouched piece is going to act like light and therefore the brightness of the sky doubled up there. How could I avoid that? Well, what I would do is just work on this layer all by itself, meaning hide the layer that's underneath at the time that I do the retouching. And therefore, when it retouches us out instead of trying to put a blue sky in there, it's gonna put what looks like would fit here, which is black, black disappears in screen mode. So now we got no problem. I can do the same thing for here. If we want some more fireworks, I can already tell that this background is not solid black. So I might pre adjust it and just bring this in. I can see this tall spike here that most likely represents the background. I'll just bring it in until it points at that click. OK? And now we can set this to once again screen mode. And now we have our lightning combining. I use the move tool. I could try to layer them over each other or put them separate, whatever. I think it's a little too much to have both. So let's hide that one. In fact, let's hide the other one and let's go for a different look. I wanted to look as if lightning hit the top of the Eiffel Tower. So let's turn this layer on. Do you see that nice bright spot right there? That's what I'm gonna use. So let's see if we use this. Um I'm gonna set it to screen mode and just like when we had the fireworks, the background being there is messing it up, we need it to be black. So I'm gonna come in here and do my adjustments levels and bring this in and tell I can't see that background about, let's see about there maybe. And then I could move the middle slider to control the brightness of what's left. I'll kind of limit that brightness like that click. OK. And now let's just use the move tool and let's get that little part there to be right up here on the tip. And I don't like this going off the edge. So let's scale it. I'm gonna do free transform, which usually I just type command T. And uh one thing I hadn't mentioned before when we've used this is you see this little cross hair in the middle, you might find that yours doesn't have that. And if you want that to show up, it's useful, I'll show you what it does in a minute. You would have to turn on this little check box right here. That just means give me a center point. And what it is is if you rotate, usually it pivots it around that point. And that's usually right in the middle of this image, but you can actually grab it and move it so I could move it right up here. So now that's gonna be the pivot point. And therefore, if I rotate that part would stay consistent, so I could do this. The other thing that it does is if I ever grab one of these corners and Paul, there is a way to get it to keep that spot in the same position. But to do so, you need to hold down the option key, Alton Windows. I have it held down right now. And therefore I could keep that in the same position. And therefore I can come over here and try to, well, I could, I don't want it to go beyond the edge, something like that hit return or enter. And now it looks somewhat like it got struck and then started coming out of the top or maybe there's an experiment going on up there at the top that created that. But you see the screen mode was useful to do it. I find that many photographers and many advertising agencies will end up putting a sun in a photograph that wasn't in the photograph to begin with. The sun was way above outside of the photos framing. Yet somehow they got it to look like it was in the photo. And especially if you go to cruise ship websites and you look at the photos they use as examples. Usually you compare the angle of the shadows that things are casting and say, well, where would the sun need to be to get a shadow to cast that way? And oftentimes it's not right. And it has to do with them adding a sun to a photo. So let's do it. I'll add it to this image that I took in Iceland. So I'm gonna open that picture and then I'm gonna go back to bridge and I took this photograph at night when it was pitch dark out. And what I did is I just took a flashlight and I shoved it in like a tree branch, some like in the, the y shape of a T tree branch. So it could be held in the air. I pointed my camera at it backed up a bit and took a photo and I took more than one. So I got this one and this one and they look different because one is pointing straight into the camera and the other is at a slight angle. Although I can see my neighbor's house back here, his lights are on. Um But I'm gonna use one of those and act as if it's the sun. So let's take those and let's get them into Photoshop. And by the way, if you're using bridge, you can just move bridge out of the way like this and grab those images and drag them over here and it's gonna put them in the image. The other thing it's gonna do, you have to hit return after you bring it over is it'll scale them down to make sure they fit within that image. That's a little trick. Uh Now, what I wanna do is decide which one of those do I want to use. Um I don't know, let's start with this one. Well, if this background is black then any one of these screen modes right here. Um Blending modes I should say should make black disappear and anything brighter than black has the potential of bright in the image. So let's just try. There's lighting screen screen is gonna act like light. It's probably gonna be the best then I can move this and I'm gonna act as if the sun was over there and I just have another version of it. I could turn on and I could try that one too screen mode and put it over there. And the only thing I'd need to do is if I could still see the background showing up here, I'd need to adjust it with levels like we did on that lightning example. But that is so common with travel photos and so many photographers do that. It's kind of funny. All right, let's look at yet another use here. I took this photo in Iceland Waterfall and I had my camera, I think on a tripod and I just went in here and took more than one shot. And I'm thinking if I use lighting mode, lighting mode would make it so I can make it look like there's more water going down that waterfall than there really was. Let's try. I'm just gonna select all the images I'm gonna go in here and say load as layers. Then if I turn off the eyeball in the top layer, just look at in here where this white is. And let's say this big white and see if on the layer underneath there is any area that would be darker there. Mm Maybe especially like right in here. If you look at that, well, if I set this to lighten mode, it's going to take the areas here that we have water in that are overlapping a dark area and let them show up. But anything that is the same brightness or is darker is not gonna show up. So let's set this to lighten and by doing so I'll just turn that off and on. You see how it looks like there's a little extra water there. Then let's go to the next layer down and set it to lighten the next layer down. In fact, we can select all these layers and just set them all to lighten. And now it looks like there's a heck of a lot more water coming down, but I don't really like what's going on down here if I turn those off and just show you one, I don't like it there. So how can we get it off of this area? Well, I'm just gonna select all but the bottom layer. And when we talked about layers in the layers lesson I talked about this which is how you could organize your layers. So if I want to put all of these inside of that folder, which is called a group, I could do. So, but the other thing you can do is you can add a layer mask. So now that layer mask is gonna limit where every single layer that's found inside of that group to uh where it shows up. So I'm gonna paint with black and just say, hey, don't show up down here. I don't want you down there. Maybe you don't show up on these side things too. There we go. So now I can turn this group off and on and see how much extra water it looks like we got. And that's all because we were using lighting mode, let's close up some of these images till we get back to our simple one. And let's look at the next section of blending modes. And those are these ones here. These ones here are all a combination of one of these modes in this section and one of the modes in this section put together. So it's got to do that in some weird way. Well, in these modes up here, white disappeared in these modes down here, black disappeared. So what's halfway between that 50% gray? So what's gonna happen with these modes is 50% gray is gonna go away and anything that is brighter than 50% gray is gonna act like one of the lighten modes and anything that is darker than 50% gray is gonna act like one of the darkened modes. Let's take a look. So when I set this to overlay, look at where 50% gray is in here, it should be halfway between black and white. So when I set it to overlay, we can see right through the middle but the areas on the right where the gradient is brighter, they're brightening the picture in some ways. And on to the left of that where it was darker, it's darkening the picture in some ways. So if I switch between all of these modes, you'll find the middle of the photo is unchanged. And on the right, this is gonna brighten the, those areas except for the very bottom one that is uh it's gonna brighten the right side in different ways and it's gonna darken the left side in different ways. So with these, I call those the contrast modes because they usually increase the amount of contrast you have in your image, 50% gray goes away. Things that are brighter, brighten, things that are dark or darken. It can be used for all sorts of things. But I think I'm only gonna show you a little bit. Uh Let's say I have um I have an image, let's say it's this one. And what I'd like to do is just give it some personality by maybe adding some texture to it. So let's go find some texture here. I have this and I have that. So let's go open those. And the one thing I need to do is make sure that this would disappear when I end up using those modes, at least the majority of this. And I'm gonna do that by coming in here and going to levels. Now in levels, when you have a texture, you're gonna find one general hump that is in here in this middle control that's here forces areas to 50% gray, whichever area this points at. Well, I already adjusted this image originally that hump was not in the middle, it was a little bit offset one side or the other and I just went to levels and I put this right in the center of the hump that made sure whatever takes up the most space within that particular document is 50% correct. And therefore it's the shade that will disappear when I use the blending modes. I just mentioned, I think I probably did the same thing to this. But let's double check. Let's just see if the hump is right in the middle. It's the tiniest bit to the left. So I'm just gonna grab this and put it right in the middle of that hump. Click. OK. That means the majority of this image is around 50% gray. Now, let's use the move tool. I'll just click here, drag up to the tab for the other image and drop it, get it, get it over there looks like it's big enough. And uh then I can close the other version that's in the window. Let's grab the other one too. Just in case we want to experiment, we'll drag it up there, drag it down into the image and close the other version of it. Move that in there. There we go. All right. Now, let's see how we could apply these textures. Well, I'll turn them off first so you can remember what the picture looked like and then let's grab maybe this one. And all I'm gonna do is choose any one of these contrast modes. Usually overlay and soft light are pretty darn good for textures. So here's overlay. And suddenly I'm seeing that a nice texture in there. Now, you can try some of the other modes like the ones up here. If we use multiply mode, it's gonna print like ink, but that's gonna darken the image quite a bit screen mode was gonna brighten it quite a bit. It's when we get in here where it can both brighten and darken that it can add these textures and we can just try the different modes and the bottom one's the weird one. But, and once you find one, if you find that the result, the effect is too strong, just come over here and, and lower the opacity and you'll lessen the effect. Then I'll turn off that layer. Let's go to the next one down and let's see what it looks like with that. I'm just gonna come down here and try overlay soft light, hard light and the others, but not the bottom one. And when it's too strong, once again, lower the opacity. So you lessen it. The other thing you could do is mask it. So it doesn't apply to something like the barn or maybe you only want it to apply to the barn, but it can be nice to know how to apply textures. If you find the texture has too much variance in it, the brightness changes too much. Then the other thing you can do is take it, this is just a picture of a wall that I took and apply a filter to it. The filter you can use is called emboss. Emboss will kind of flatten it out and just adjust this setting called height and the amount controls how much contrast there is in it. And whenever you use in boss, most of this, like 90% of this is 50% gray. So it lines up with all those blending modes. So that's a fine texture. Let's apply a texture to a texture. Here, I have a color uh version. It was just a wall that was painted, but I wish it had more dimensionality to it. So what I'm gonna do is duplicate the layer and one way of duplicating a layer is dragging it down to the new layer icon and that will make a copy. Then I showed you that filter that was called emboss. Well, let's try it because that seems to add some three dimensionality to this and then I'll click. OK. I can see color in here. I see some greenish though and I don't want the color to shift so I can come over and choose desaturate, desaturate does the exact same thing as going into this where you have a saturation slider and just turning it all the way down. And that means pull out all the color. Then let's try the bunny modes. Here's overlay and soft light and hard light. I'm kind of like in hard light. If you want to see the difference let's turn it off. There's without and there's with, it's rather subtle, but it is making it feel like that texture has a little bit more dimension to it. If I want to double it up, I can always duplicate the layer again. And oftentimes that will double up. All right, let's talk about some other bloody modes ones where that simple document with the gradient in it won't help. Uh what I want to talk about now is down at the bottom. We have hue saturation color and luminosity. Well, hue means basic color. So what if I want to change the basic color of this car? I could click on my foreground color and let's say I want the car to be blue. Well, then I choose blue to paint with and watch. What happens if I grab my paintbrush now and I paint on this particular layer. Oops something I messed up first, I forgot the last time I used the paintbrush tool, I set this menu to darken that would control how this particular tool affects the layer I'm working on. That wouldn't affect it so much right now, but I don't know how, but I didn't get this set to the choice called hue. That's what I wanted. Now, let's see what this will do to the layer. All I'm gonna do is click here and start painting and look at what happens wherever it is. I paint, I'm gonna end up starting to make the car blue. And if I paint across an area that's chrome, it's not generally gonna affect it all that much. If I paint across the headlights, not gonna affect it much. And that's because this is changing only the basic color. What it can't change is how colorful something is in areas that contain chrome don't contain much color. Uh So therefore, they're not affected all that much. They are affected though, if I hide this layer and I turn it back on, I can see the chrome shifting a little bit in color. So let's say I want to get this car to look like it's, I don't know, painted with a rainbow of colors. Well, what I could do is come up here to the select menu and maybe say I want it to select the subject. It's grayed out right now because the layer I'm working on is hidden. I just need to click on the layer below. Hopefully, you can find that car and therefore I won't get over spray on the background. I might then grab a tool that makes easy selections like the object selection tool. I might come down here and tell it by holding on the option key to take away what I'm painting around, which here would be the tires. I don't want the tires to change color. I'll do the same thing for the back tire and the same thing for this front tire on the other side. Not close enough. Then I'm gonna work on a new layer because I got that layer messed up with paint. And I'm gonna make sure that layer is set to hue. And then let's grab our gradient tool. I'm gonna come up here to choose my preset for my gradient and I'm gonna use the one that looks like a rainbow. And let's see what happens. Now, if I click here and I drag all the way to the other side of the car. Now we got a rainbow car and the layer mask is not perfect. I'd have to touch it up here to get that to look just right and everything if I did not have the layer mask uh on here, which uh is limiting where this gradient shows up, it automatically got converted into the layer mask, it would have affected the background and the tires which actually doesn't look all that bad. So maybe I'll just turn that off. Uh When we talked about layer mask, I mentioned you could hold down shift and click on it to disable it. I just did that, but this can only change the color of things that are already colorful and it's not able to change how colorful they are. And that's why the chrome bumpers you can't really tell that they've changed. Well, they have changed. It's just there was only the tiniest hint of color in there and that tiny hint changed. Then let's look at another blending mode. In this case, I'm gonna create a solid color layer. I just went to the um adjustment layer icon down here to solid color and I'm just gonna choose a vivid color. It doesn't matter which color, it doesn't matter if it's green or red or blue, the color itself is going to be ignored. The only thing that's gonna be paid attention to is how colorful is this. And what I wanted to do is take the image that's underneath and make it just as colorful as this. But don't shift the colors. If there was an area that's red, I still want to look red. There's an area that's pink or, or some other color, I still want it to look like that just make it as colorful as this. Well, that's known as down here saturation. And so this is what I call a saturation map, which means that it's showing me what color is in the various areas of the image because oftentimes those colors are too subtle to notice. And so now I can turn that off and now I actually hadn't noticed this before, but this little area here is orangish and it's surrounded by a different color. I didn't notice that before turning this on and being able to see that. And so sometimes that can be helpful to inform you more about what's going on with the colors in your image and let you notice uh different things about it. Like here noticing how this is going from this kind of greenish yellow to a more reddish out here, turn this off and it was more subtle and I might not have thought about it quite as much. Uh And sometimes that will influence how you adjust the picture. Although you might not be at that level where it would really help you that much yet. Then I'm gonna do an adjustment to this image. I'm gonna go over and use curves and I'm gonna add some contrast to the image. Uh It means I'll darken one area a bit, I'll brighten another area a bit. And any time you end up adjusting something where you're changing the brightness, the saturation, how colorful the image is, it will often shift I'll back off on the brightness of the bright areas. So if I turn off this adjustment, here's before here's after notice the dresser that's in there became more colorful. Well, if you ever use an adjustment layer and you want to add the contrast that you were adding or change the brightness you were doing, but you notice the color shift in a way that you did not intend. Then with that adjustment layer active, you could change this menu to the bottommost choice, which is called luminosity. Luminosity is just another word for brightness. And that means let this layer only change the brightness of what's underneath it. So if I turn the eyeball off and back on it's able to add the contrast I wanted without causing color issues. So if you're ever trying to adjust what I would call the tonality of a picture, which is its brightness and its contrast and you have unintended color shifts, change it to luminosity for the layer that you're working on when it comes to that adjustment layer, then I guess we can talk about one more mode. Let's say this image was black and white. I'm just gonna come in here and choose desaturate to make it look black and white. Well, the first thing you need to do if you wanted to add color is to make sure that the image is not in a mode called gray scale. It might be if it started out as a black and white picture and if it is in that mode, you'd have to change it over here to R GB because in that mode, you can't have any color. But over here you can't, then I would create a new layer. And if I wanted to add a color to this, I would grab my paintbrush and paint on that particular layer, then I would change this menu to a choice that is called color. And what color means is apply the color that's on this layer to the brightness that's underneath. And therefore I can dial in whatever color I want and paint in here. And the only problem with it is it's very easy then to have a color that's too colorful, that doesn't look realistic. So you might need to click on your foreground color and mellow out that color a little more than you might expect to get it to look uh appropriate for something. But if you want to add color to something you, that doesn't already have it, then set it to color. Uh if it's too much, you can also lower the opacity. So you're not going to apply quite as much. But if you ever want to colorize black and white photographs, that's one method for doing it. So we've been exploring this menu and I haven't covered every single choice that's in it because some of the choices you never use like dissolve, I never use. What does it do? It makes it. So if you have anything in a layer that would have a soft edge or you could see through it makes it so you can't see through it at all. So it's either fully dense pixels or not at all. I don't know when you need that, but there are some uses for it, but just not common ones. I'll show you one other section. Let's uh grab two images and I'm going to get him into Photoshop. Uh Right now, remember I used auto align layers when I worked with a bunch of these images because if I turn off one layer, it's in a different position than another. Well, if that ever doesn't work it just fails and sometimes it will, then you could use a mode in here that is called difference. What difference does is it compares the layer you're working on to what's underneath it. And it tries to show you where they're different, wherever they're not different, it shows you black and the more radically different something is it will show it as being brighter or more colorful. So let's say I needed to manually line these two images up because auto align layers simply failed. Well, now I can move this. And what I'm gonna do is look at the cross. That's right here. And I'm gonna get it and tell they get really close to lining up. I know you can oops, you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to nudge it. And so I'm gonna nudge this, nudge it up and I'm trying to get it to turn black or close to black. So that's about as close as I can get it there in order to get the stuff like over here, I'm either gonna need to rotate or scale and then suddenly these might line up so I can type command t to transform you. Remember that little center thing? I'm gonna put that right up here because that already lines up and let's see if it needs to rotate. I'll bring it up and down. I'm just looking at the window on the far left to say, is it get to line up a little closer, a little bit. But then I think I need to scale it. So in order to scale it and keep the cross here in the same spot, I mentioned it, but I doubt you remember it. You'd have to hold on option and then I could scale it and I'm just scaling it until it gets as close to black on that window on the far left as I can and then I could rotate a little more if need be. But I'm trying to get that thing to line up and look as close to black. That's about as close as I can get with a simple try. But that should line up a heck of a lot closer than it did before. So here I'll turn this off and back on and you can tell that in order to truly get it to line up, you'd have to distort that layer a bit. So blending modes, this menu is supremely powerful. You can do so many things that you could write an entire book on it. In fact, there was a book many years ago just about that menu and I hope that you have some sense for what can be done with it and why these layer blend modes are grouped together. And these are in a separate category and same with these in all of these down here, they are comparative modes. They compare the layer you're working on to what's under it and wherever it's different, it's gonna show you where it looks different. So that's plenty modes. We might use that a little bit more in other sections of the class to do creative things. And maybe when we're doing advanced retouching or something, we'll need one of those. You're never gonna fully master that menu. I've been using Photoshop for almost 35 years and I haven't mastered that menu even though it's something I use almost every day.