Photoshop Blending Modes Explained: A Practical Guide for Artists and Designers (2023)

Blend modes are a critical component to usePhotoshopfor everything and nothing. Whether it's graphic design, photo editing, or illustration, knowing how to harness the immense power of 27 blend modes is a must to improve your workflow and efficiency. But it can be intimidating for many budding artists and new designers. There is a lot to unpack and a seeming mountain of technical information to understand and many tend to delay a full understanding rather than learn it bit by bit, which is unfortunate considering how important a blending modes tool is.

then ourpracticalguide to Photoshop blend modes, simplified to give you a working understanding of what you wantneedknow about each one.

What are blend modes in Photoshop?

Blend modes are special layer properties that determine how pixels on that layer affect pixels on the layer below. Using blend modes in Photoshop allows artists and designers to combine tints, values, and other properties of shape layers that can create unique effects, increase efficiency, and allow you to work nondestructively.

Learning how to use blend modes in Photoshop is a critical beginning skill for the aspiring digital artist or graphic designer, and something you can't help but skip: even those looking to make the leap from traditional art need to understand what blend modes are. fusion. and how to use them, even if they choose to delete them later as part of their process.

How blend modes work in Photoshop

When it comes to understanding how blend modes work in Photoshop, it's important to consider the properties of an image. Next, we'll look at the main components of a "color" that blend modes manipulate to create new effects.

Keep in mind that the exact mechanics of color modeling get complicated quickly once you start delving into the science of color theory, computer graphics, and human perception, but we'll simplify it here to understand blend modes. .

What iscor?

Simply put, any color is a combination of hue, saturation, and value/lightness, commonly known as HSV and HSL. Together, these components determine the color and how different it is from the colors around it.

Hue

Hue is, in simple terms, the pure, unadulterated "pigment" behind color. To make an analogy with tint, it's the ink that comes out of the tube, with no ink and no shades of black or white.

Saturation

Saturation essentially determines how much of the "pigment" is within the color, ranging from 0 (no color) to 100 (the pure hue). To condense saturation in traditional painting terms, saturation is analogous to the amount of white that has been added to the pigment to create a "hue." For example, mixing a pure red pigment with white reduces the amount of "red" in the mix, resulting in some level of pink.

Valor

The value, in simple terms, is how much black is inside the color, ranging from 0 (pure hue) to 100 (pure black). Everything between 0 and 100 are "hues" where the hue is mixed with some level of black to darken it accordingly. Value is what creates contrast between shades of the same saturation, allowing the dark/light to shine through in an image.

Photoshop blend modes explained

There are currently 27 blend modes in Photoshop, each of which provides its own unique effect based on information from the base layer. Next we will show each of the different modes with an example of their effects. For demonstration purposes, our base layer will be set to normal using this (oversaturated) photo of tinted roses:

With the image below on top as our blend layer.

normal blend modes

Normal

Normal blending mode is Photoshop's default, where the color information of the pixels is not affected by any other effect. At full opacity, the gradient and swatches completely block out the underlying photo.

Dissolve

At full opacity, the Liquify blend mode resembles the Normal blend mode. However, once you start lowering the opacity, the number of displayed pixels is randomly erased, creating the well-known dissolve effect that leaves the remaining pixels unadulterated with any additional effect.

Darken blend modes

darken

The Darken blend mode compares the colors of the base layer to the blend layer, replacing any pixelslighterthat layer of fusion with those of the latter; any darker colors in the base coat will remain unchanged.

Multiply

Multiply, as the name suggests, takes the numerical data of the color in the base layer and multiplies it with the blend layer, resulting in darker versions of the same color palette. However, multiplying with black always results in black, as shown in the bottom left sample, while multiplying with white has no effect, as shown below.right handshow. Because, when used with darker colors, multiply allows you to retain a color palette similar to that of the original base layer while at the same time making it darker, multiply is a favored tool for digital artists looking to render shapes quickly or iterate lighting scenarios.

burned Color

Color Burn darkens the image by increasing the contrast between the base layer and the blend layer. This visibly brings out the lower range midtones of an image, while having minimal effect at higher values.

linear combustion

Linear Burn darkens by reducing the brightness of an image by the value of the blend layer. This reduces the increased saturation effect exhibited by Color Burn and shows a more consistent progression towards black within the value gradient.

darker color

Darker Color goes pixel-by-pixel, picking out the darkest color from either layer similar to Darken, but takes a more mathematically thorough look at the RGB channels, which you don't need to know yet if you're just dipping your toes. in color modes blend in Photoshop. Suffice to say that it is similar to Darken.

This results in a hybrid of both coats that is darker overall without creating new colors. This is best demonstrated in the grayscale swatches below, where none of the base layer pixels are shown on the bottom left, nor any blend layers in the white swatch on the bottom right, while the 50 % gray in the center is relatively uniform. the two layers.

Blending modes Lighten

clear out

Lighten is the opposite of Darken in that it compares the RGB channel of each pixel and displays the darker of the two layers, resulting in a brighter overall image.

bodies

The canvas multiplies the inverse of the colors in the base and blend layers, creating a brighter version of the image but maintaining a similar color palette. Like Multiply, this makes it one of the blend modes that is especially useful for digital artists and illustrators who want to add quick lighting to an image and insert reflections.

color dodge

Color Dodge is another popular blend mode and equivalent to the Color Burn blend mode. Color Dodge increases brightness by decreasing the contrast between the color of both layers, resulting in the same saturation boost in the mid-tone range as Color Burn, but cancels out when mixed with black. Illustrators and digital artists in particular need to be careful not to dodge too much with color, as while it can bring energy and interest to specific elements, it can quickly throw a composition off balance.

Linear Dodge (add)

Linear Dodge, or Add as it is often called in other software like Procreate, is a simple tool that brightens the base layer according to the blend layer. Linear Dodge, as seen in the example, is a much more powerful brightness tool than the other blend modes and can be used, sparingly, to add highlights and manually increase contrast in parts of the image.

Lighter colour

The lighter color is the counterpart to the darker color, using the same comparison process across all color channels in both layers to choose the lighter alternative to display. Lighter Color produces less aggressive changes than Lighten by working only with the on-screen color palette

Contrast Blending Modes

Cover

Overlay is an extremely useful tool for introducing natural lighting into an image quickly and efficiently. The overlay will multiply or filter the colors in the base layer, depending on their lightness or darkness, while blending the colors of the two layers, resulting in a third layer, preserving the composition value of the blending layer. This is especially useful for showing the effects of colored light on a surface that has already been rendered with the local color; for example, in the case of red light on a blue shape, shadows and reflections on the blue shape will stay in place during tinting. General change to violet or purple.

dim light

cores nobasethe blend layer prevents layers lighter than 50% gray, while colors darker than 50% are burned. Dodge and burn effects are weaker than if applied directly, resulting in a softer, less harsh contrast between shadows and highlights that's immediately easier on the eyes. Mixing with black and white will darken/lighten accordingly, but will not result in pure black or white. As you can see here in the image, Soft Light helps bring out the vibrancy of the midtones without knocking the door down with a burst of contrast.

Bright light

Hard Light works in the same way as Overlay, albeit to a much, much greater degree. Depending on the brightness ofmixinglayer, the colors will be multiplied or filtered. Hard Light, as seen above, has an incredibly intense effect on the image and should be used at different levels of opacity to produce the best results.

Bright light

The way Soft Light applies Burn and Dodge simultaneously, so does Vivid Light with Darken and Lighten: it darkens the parts where the blend color is darker than 50% gray by increasing the contrast and lightening the parts where the blend color is darker than 50% gray. mix is ​​lighter than 50% gray decreasing contrast. Like Hard Light, it's easy to go overboard with Vivid Light.

linear light

Linear lighting is pretty straightforward: compare the lightness of the base color to the blend color and linear dodge or burn accordingly. Like the rest of the Contrast blend modes, the threshold is 50% gray: anything above it will be lighter, and anything below it will be darker. This is another of the powerful contrast tools that, as you can see, has a relatively extreme effect on the overall image, rapidly turning from almost black to almost white, even at the extremes of the midtone range.

Light pin

Pin Light applies Lighten and Darken simultaneously, but in a two-step process that's a bit more involved than the other contrast modes. While 50% gray is still the threshold for the effect, what Pin Light does is first compare the lightness of the blend color and the base color. If the blend color is lighter than 50% gray, it replaces all base colors that are darker than the blend color, leaving those that are lighter than the blend color in their place. If the blend color applied isdarker50% Gray replaces all base colors that are lighter than the blend color, leaving darker colors in their place. 50% is essentially the threshold at which Pin Light chooses to Lighten or Darken, but it may have no effect or a great effect depending on the lightness of the colors it contains.

hard mix

Hard Mix is ​​a crazy blend mode that essentially adds all the RGB values ​​from the base layer to the blend layer, turning everything white, black, or one of the six primary hues on the color wheel to full saturation.

Reverse Blend Modes

Difference

Difference is an incredibly useful blending mode that analyzes which of the two colors is brighter and subtracts the individual channel values ​​from the other layer, moving dark tones away from light tones on the color wheel. The difference can be used as an initial step to add color to grayscale images by preserving the values, adding an overall color to the image as a difference layer, and reducing the opacity. This leaves the image flooded with a new paintable tint.

Exclusion

Dropout works similar to diff as shown above, but noticeably loses power as the blend layer value approaches 50% gray.

Subtract

Subtract is an interesting tool that can be used to darken the lightest parts of an image. As shown above, combining with white results in pure black, while combining with black has no effect on the image. This is because Photoshop subtracts the value of the blend layer from the base layer, resulting in darker highlights and unaffected shadows.

Share

While it may be counter-intuitive, Divide is the functional opposite of Subtract(noAdd); Divide takes the value of each color channel in the base layer's blend layer. This results in lighter shadows and unaffected highlights, as shown above.

Component Blend Modes

Hue

Hue is a useful tool for forcing a base layer color change, preserving the value and saturation of the base layer and replacing it with only thehueof the blend layer, that is, it keeps the dark shadows and light highlights while only replacing the local tone, as demonstrated in the color swatches above in the image.

Saturation

Saturation has the same effect as hue, except with, well, sduration.The base layer's luminance, value, and hue are maintained while the saturation is replaced by the blend color. The flowers in the example above are already highly saturated, making the effect less visible.

heart

Color works similarly to Hue, except that it only preserves the luminance of the base color while adding Hue.mimix color saturation.

bright

Essentially the opposite of Color, Luminosity maintains the hue and saturation of the base color while replacing its luminosity with that of the blend color. A useful tool for examining the importance of strong values ​​in an image.

That's our how-to guide to Photoshop blend modes. There's a lot going on under the hood, but for all intents and purposes, the blend modes work pretty well once you have some basic control over them. The best way to learn the tools at your disposal is, and always will be, to experiment on your own until your choice of blend mode becomes intuitive.