From the course: Introducing Photoshop

The three essential blend modes - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Introducing Photoshop

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The three essential blend modes

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- [Instructor] All right now in addition to the opacity value, you can create more complex interactions between layers using what are known as blend modes. And you get to blend modes by clicking on the word normal up here in the top left corner of the Layers panel. And so notice if I click on that option, that I see a very long list of blend modes, none of which make much sense when you first see them, which is why I'm going to tell you that you only need to worry about three of them. And so I'll go ahead and press the Esc key in order to hide that menu. And I'll turn off the night layer. And I'll turn on this folder of layers right here, which is known as a layer group, which contains this text. And so notice that we have these three blend modes multiply, screen and overlay. Multiply is the blend mode if you want to use one layer to darken the layers below it. Screen is the blend mode if you want to use one layer to lighten the layers below it and overlay is going to use the active layer in order to add contrast, the normal mode, the one that's selected by default is equivalent to turning the blend mode off. And so let me show you what that looks like using a standard black to white gradient. And so I'm going to turn off that blend modes group right there. And I'll go ahead and click on the background in order to select it. And then I'll drop down to this little black and white circle at the bottom of the Layers panel, and I'll click on it in order to bring up this menu here. And now what you want to do in order to create a dynamic gradient inside Photoshop is choose this second command gradient, which brings up this dialog box right here. Now you want to click this down pointing arrow head to the right of this gradient option in order to bring up a list of gradients that ship along with Photoshop. Then click on this little triangle. In order to twirl open the basics group and select this third gradient, the one that reads black, white, and that'll create a standard black to white gradient. Now you want to click off that option to hide those gradients and change the angle value to zero degrees so that we have a horizontal gradient that goes from black on the left hand side to white on the right hand side, then click okay. And now notice if I click on the word normal in order to bring up this list of blend modes, that we have a group of darkening modes that begins with the word darken a group of lightening modes that begins with lighten and a group of contrast modes that begins with overlay. Notice if I choose darken, which seems to make the most sense that we get this very murky transition here in the middle of the gradient. And so in other words, those grays are creating a kind of haze. To get rid of that haze switch from darken to the next mode down, multiply, and we get this nice smooth transition. So anytime you want to use a layer to darken the layers below, multiplies is the way to go. Let's imagine that we want to use the gradient to lighten the layers below instead, then you might think lighten is the way to go. But again, the gray values in that gradient end up creating a kind of haze to get rid of the haze, you switch to the next mode down, which is screen. And then finally, if you want to use the gradient to enhance the contrast of the layers below, then go ahead and click on that item and switch to overlay instead. And you'll end up with this effect here, where the blacks are darkening, the whites are lightening and the grays are absolutely disappearing in between. Now the great thing about blend modes these days inside a Photoshop is that you can preview them on the fly just by hovering over a mode such as soft light, hard light, and so forth. And notice if I go with hard light, I'm creating a kind of combination of multiply and screen so that I'm keeping the blacks over here on the left hand side. I'm keeping the whites on the right hand side and I'm dropping all the grays in between. And so all you really need to remember is that we have three great blend modes multiply to darken, screen to lighten, and overlay in order to enhance the contrast.

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