Adobe Photoshop CS5 Tutorials
Working with Layers / Blending Modes & Opacity
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Photoshop CS5 / Working with Layers / Blending Modes & Opacity)
I've got to show you something inside Photoshop's Layers Palette called Blending Modes but before I do I just want to mention that I made a couple of quick, very minor changes to my layout here. First of all, I collapsed down all of my layer styles here inside the Layers Palette just by clicking on this arrow here over on the right-hand side just to kind of keep things nice and tidy and you know, the other thing that I did and I'm not sure if you can see this onscreen or not, but I changed the color of the stroke that was on my text. Instead of going with a pure black, I changed it to a very, very, very dark gray so it's almost like a dark charcoal gray just to kind of give it a little, a little something. In any regard, let me show you this thing called Blending Modes inside Photoshop and I'm going to give you kind of the abbreviated version of Blending Modes because we have so much more to get to. What I'll do is I'll select my Stripe Layer and once again, before I actually get going here, I'll kind of give you a sense of what blending modes are. Think of them as special effects; again, layer-based special effects. So I select my layer inside the Layers Palette and I go alright, I want to apply some effects to this layer. Now, specifically, what a blending mode is is and I don't want to get too crazy on you here but it's a, it's a mathematical algorithm, it's a mathematical calculation where it'll essentially take the pixels on the selected layer and blend them in some way with the layers beneath, if that makes sense. Now, that's kind of the, sort of the textbook description. The actual real-world description or the real-world example is grab a layer and then at the top of the Layers Palette, drop down this Blending Mode Menu and go crazy. But the only reason why I give you the textbook explanation is because you might be sitting there going OK, what really is the difference between lighten, if I choose lighten and difference? What is the difference between those two? Well, again, it's a calculation between the pixels on the Stripe Layer and the layers beneath and you can see I've got a result here down inside my document so that's difference being applied to the Stripe Layer, which is really cool. That's kind of a cool effect. But what I can do here essentially is hunt around inside my list of blending modes and see if I can come up something. For example, maybe I'll wind up on, let's try Lighten for instance and it didn't really do anything to the white stripe but now what I can do is I can add in the dimension of opacity. So what I can do is I can actually drop down this Opacity Slider and fade back my white stripe, something like this. So in other words, the further towards the left I drag this slider, the lighter the white stripe or the object on the selected layer becomes. You can do some really cool effects here and again, I'm giving you the really quick sort of down and dirty version here. So you can really go crazy and do some cool things and you know, it gets even crazier when you select a layer that actually has lots of different color on it. Now, I could use my Clouds Layer but there's nothing beneath my Clouds Layer so I'm going to have to go with Statue and he only really has gray in him. But I can grab the Statue Layer and then let's go and try, for example, Multiply and I get something like this and then I could take that multiply and I could fade him back a little bit into the clouds, something like this, right, to get that sort of a result. Or maybe I want to make the Statue look almost like a ghost, sort of a ghost effect. Well, usually for that I would go with Overlay and then drop the opacity down, something like this, right? Again, some very cool results. And by the way, as you're messing around with this Opacity Slider, instead of actually dropping down a slider and moving the slider, you can actually click and drag right on the Opacity Text inside the Layers Palette to sort of scrub back and forth if you will. So in any regard, that's kind of the short and sweet version of Blending Modes. I wish we had more time. Again, they're non-destructive. If I want to go all the way back to where we started, all I need to do is switch my Statue Layer from Overlay or from Difference or whatever effect I'm on right now, all the way back to Normal, which is found at the top of the list and I'm all the way back to where we began.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Photoshop CS5 |
| Author: | Geoff Blake |
| SKU: | 34150 |
| ISBN: | 1-936334-46-1 |
| Release Date: | 2010-08-06 |
| Duration: | 7.5 hrs / 95 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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