5 Common Photoshop Blending Modes For Photography

Learn about 5 photoshop blending modes that can help you edit your photos better. These blending modes are some of the most commonly used for photo editing.

There are 27 blending modes in Photoshop, they all have a purpose, but you don’t have to know them all. In this video, I show you five common Photoshop blending modes for photography to help you make your photos more interesting.

What Are Photoshop Blending Modes?

So blending modes in Photoshop offer different ways for a layer to blend or interact with the layers below it. Without blending modes the only way to blend layers is by lowering the layer’s opacity, which doesn’t produce very interesting results. So your blending modes are over here on the right-hand side, this panel. And there’s a huge list of them. And as you can see, there are sections that these photoshop blending modes are divided up into. So the first blending mode, which is part of the five most common PhotoShop blending modes for photography, we’re gonna go and use the multiply blending mode. So one thing to note is none of the blending modes are going to work on the background layer. You’ll see, or you’ll know that because the dropdown from the blending modes will be grayed out.

The Multiply Photoshop Blending Mode

So here are all our blend modes. Now, in PhotoShop, if you just hover over each of the blend modes, you can see how it interacts with the photo. So with this top layer, and using the multiply blend mode, you’re gonna see that these lighter areas go away. The darker areas stay dark and any areas that are not quite as dark, get darker. So coming down to the multiply blend mode, you can see that this photo, any of the light areas got darker. If it was real light or white, it would disappear and the dark areas stay dark.

The Screen Photoshop Blending Mode

The screen blending mode is found in the lighten group. It works the opposite of the multiply blending mode. It lightens the image by removing the dark areas and makes the light areas lighter. So here in this example, we have two images. The bottom one is these hands with all these lights and the top one is basically a stock image with lighting effects. So on this top image here, if I go to the screen blend mode, you can see that it has removed all the dark areas and made the lighter areas even lighter, so that’s what the screen blending mode does.

The Overlay Photoshop Blending Mode

The overlay mode is part of the contrast group of blending modes, designed to boost the contrast in an image. The Overlay photoshop blending mode multiplies dark areas and screens light areas at the same time. So dark areas become darker and light areas become lighter. Let’s see how that works here. In this example, I’m gonna add a little bit more punch to the eyes here. And on a new layer, I’m going to paint white on the eyes right here. B for the brush tool with a soft round brush and I’m just going to paint right in this area right here. I’m not gonna be real careful. And I’m gonna change the blending mode to overlay. And there is the before and there’s the after. If you feel that’s too strong, what you can also use is the soft light blend mode. And there is the before and there’s the after. And if you think that is too much, you can drop the opacity a little bit. There’s the before and there’s the after.

The Color Photoshop Blending Mode

The color blending mode is in the composite group and is actually a combination of the first two modes in the composite group, hue, and saturation. When you change the layer’s blend mode to color, only the color, that is all of the hues and saturation values from the layer is blended in with a layer or layers below it. The color blend mode is perfect for when you want to add or change the colors of an image without changing the brightness values. Color photoshop blending mode is actually perfect for making monochromatic images. So I’m going to add a solid color adjustment layer and say, okay, I’m going to turn it off right now, because I wanna sample some of this color right here and I’m gonna change this solid color fill layer to the color of that background. And I’m gonna change my blend mode to color. Now, this is a monochromatic effect. If I want, I could lower that effect a little bit and get something like that.

The Luminosity Photoshop Blending Mode

Whereas the color photoshop blending mode blends the colors of a layer while ignoring lightness values, the luminosity mode blends the lightness values while ignoring the color information. In photo editing, changing the blending mode of a layer to luminosity is often the final step. For example, a very common photo editing technique is to use either levels or curves, adjustment layer, to improve overall contrast in an image. And in many cases, this works perfectly. The problem you can run into though is that levels and curves affect not only the lightness values in an image, but they also affect the color. By increasing image contrast, you’re also increasing color saturation.

By changing the levels or curves layers to the luminosity photoshop blending mode, we easily avoid the problem of telling PhotoShop to ignore the color information completely. I want to add some contrast to this image here. I’m going to add a curves adjustment layer and add some contrast. I’m going to make a slight S curve and you can see there’s a difference in the contrast and what’s happened is the saturation has also increased too in this image. And you can see that in her skin where there is before and there’s after, but there’s some saturation increasing the blues, they’re also increasing.

And now, if I come down here to luminosity blending mode, here is the before and here’s the after and you don’t see that shift in the saturation, like in her skin there and in the blue, in the whole image. It just affects the lightness and so the adjustment of the contrast with the curves will not affect the image when you put the blending mode in luminosity.

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