How to Use the Blending Modes in Photoshop Part 1/2

Hello everyone and welcome back! This is the fourth video in my Photoshop CS3 tutorial series. I'm Chad West to less a.k.a still descended. I apologize, I know this video is a few days late, but I’ve had a hectic few last days and unfortunately the video had to get to wait, but I’m back and we’re ready to get back on track. So, I said at the end of the last video that I was going to show you how to use the pen tool, but I lied. Instead, I'm going to show you how to use Blending Modes. And I said this because I think it’s important to learn everything inside of the layers palette before we move along and start fooling with something like the selection tools. But eventually, we’ll move along to the selection tools. But for now, we’re going to stay inside the layers pallete. So, I'm going to be using the Blending Modes to blend this image, this texture into this photograph. And I'm going to give this photo a very aged to look like you came out of grandma’s closet. And both of these images came from SXC.hu which is a photography website, a free stock photography website with wonderful resources whether you’re a designer or a photographer. They have free things for you to use in your projects. So, before we get started, I should explain what the Blending Modes are. Blending Modes are going to give your photos a different looks and different feels depending on what each Blend Mode was designed to do. There are 25 Blend Modes in Photoshop CS3 and each one is going to work at your photo in a slightly different way. Maybe based on color value or based on the luminously values of your photo. So, it’s pretty important to experiment with these blending modes to find an effect you like. So, to get started with our project, I'm going to drag this texture into this black and white photo, and use Control T or Command T to bring up the free transform dialogue to position this texture the way you like it over your photo and press ENTER. Now, I'm going to rename layer 1 to texture and right here where it says normal is a dropdown box. I'm going to choose overlay and you can see immediately that my top layer becomes semi- transparent. But I still retain the color and these black blotches. So, if you are happy with this– I suppose I should have enlarged it so you can see it. Now, if you are happy with this as your aged photo effect, you can feel free to save it and move along, but I'm going to continue experimenting with my blending modes, to see if maybe there’s something else I can come up with that I would like a little bit better. So, with my texture still highlighted, I’m going to cycle through my blend modes using the up and down there on my keyboard. I'm blending in brown produces a nice effect, but I think it’s a bit too dark. I'm going to stick with overlay for now. Now, I'm going to duplicate my background layer which I do by hitting Control or Command J and I'm going to rename this to working copy. Now, let’s see. Remember that my texture is still set to overlay. I'm going to change the blend mode of my working copy to anything else just to see what else I can come up with. That seems to have a kind of sinister feel to it, that’s multiply, darker color, light screen, a lighter color here and paint it light. I'm going to use screen and I'm going to make another copy of my working copy layer. I'm going to rename this two and tonight is not my night folks. There we go to multiply. And I'm going to set the blending mode to multiply and you can see that immediately brings back the color in our photo. And what I've done is actually multiplied the effect of this bottom layer right here I have screened, so the multiply blending mode, multiplies the effect of the screen blending mode. So, if you are satisfied and you like the way that looks, you can feel to save it and move right along. Again, or let’s see I'm going to keep working with the blending mode on the working copy here. I'm going to keep my multiply layers set to multiply and scroll through the blending modes, to see what happens when I multiply each of these other blending modes. And now, most of these are substantially darker. They all have a pretty sinister feel to them which is not what I'm going for because I want something light. So, I'm going to adjust the opacity of my multiply layer. And another important factor that affects the way your blending modes display, their effects is the position that these layers are in. See, right now, I have my texture layer on top. But if I were to drag this to be the bottom of the stack, I’ll produce a different effect. I have multiply set to 66 %, the working copy with screen set to 100% and the texture set overlay at 100%. But let’s have the texture set normally at 100% and you see it produces a different effect. So let’s cycle through all of these blend modes each at 100%. Multiply, overlay.