So we have been working with this file for the past couple of lessons and as you know it's in the RGB color mode and what RGB means is essentially Red, Green and Blue, which are the colors that are perceived when light is being viewed or when images are captured via camera and things like that. So essentially what these colors are doing are overlaying with one another and interacting with each other to form this colored photograph that you see here. So a good example of this, if I can go ahead I will close up this file by using Command or Ctrl+W on the keyboard, I am going to jump back in my Chapter 1 Project Files folder and I am going to open up Graduate Channels.psd.
And when I open that up here you are going to see that I have inside of this document, if I can click back on the Layers Panel here. I have all of the channels represented as individual layers. Now, this is not something you would see normally simply because you can't really take your channels and turn them into individual layers like this, but what I have done is just taken the channel values and moved them over as layers. But this is a great way to show you exactly how these channels interact with one another. So here is your Red Channel obviously here on top and if I turn that off for just a moment there is the Green Channel and right underneath that would be your Blue Channel as well.
Now just alone these images do not interact with one another at all. So what you have to do then is change these files to interact with one another via the Blend modes here inside of Photoshop. So what I am going to do, I am going to turn off the Red Channel really quick here and I am going to click down on the Green Channel image and I am going to change this layer's Blend Mode to Screen.
And when I do that you are going to see that it interacts with that Blue Channel beneath and we are starting to get back some of the look from that original image there, and if I go ahead here I will jump out of Full-screen Mode here by tapping the F key a few times on my keyboard and I am going to go ahead and navigate back up into the Chapter 1 Project Files folder, I will open up Graduate.psd and I will move it over and what we are going to do -- let me close this out of the way here, I am going to go ahead and I am going to take a look at this image here with the same type of interaction, but using the Channels Panel.
So we are going to go ahead, we will click on Channels, I am going to turn off the Red Channel like so, and so here you have just the Green and the Blue Channels active here and they are interacting much the same way that this image here on the left is. Now it's going to look a little bit different here because the values might be slightly different on these files but you are getting the idea of exactly how these things interact with one another. This is how Green and Blue interact with one another here in Channels and Layers. And if I go ahead then inside of the Graduate Channels.psd file and then come back to the Layers Panel and choose to active that Red Channel, there you see by default it just overlays over the top there without any interaction with those Channels at all.
So what we are going to do is we are going to change the Blend Mode of this layer to Screen as well and what that's doing is just aligning that to lighten up those images behind there and interact with those by overlaying itself over the top. So now you see once I have done that I have created this nice RGB composite basically from these three different layers here. Now the Channels Panel is going to look really different in this particular image when I have those images without the Blend modes attached to them, but as you can see here the Channels look pretty much the same as they would in the other image, simply because I have those different Blend modes set on those layers. So if I go back here into the Graduate.psd you will see there that the Channels really don't change at all because of the fact that I have the Blend modes set in that other image so they look almost exactly the same.
So now you should have a better understanding of exactly how these channels work inside of Photoshop and how they interact with one another to create these composite images. So as we go forward with this series we are just going to be taking a look at what the channels look like for each individual set of color modes and we are not going to be necessarily going through and showing you how these interact. So I just wanted to make sure that you understand exactly how Photoshop takes these gray-scale images and then converts them into a colored RGB composite simply by overlaying the color values to create a nice RGB composite at the end.
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