Subtitles of the Movie

Welcome to this lesson on Blend Ranges probably one of the least used or understood features in Paint Shop Pro Photo and I'd like to quickly review it for you in this lesson. To access Blend Ranges double click on a Layer in the Layers Palette and then go to the middle tab called Blend Ranges and here we've got a couple options. We have a channel, we have this layer and then a control and underlining layer and the similar control. Blend Ranges allows you to specify a type of blending and then modify Pixel Opacity based on the settings you choose. So when we choose the Blend Channel of Gray we're basing our criteria on the lightness values of the pixels, not color information but lightness. We can also select between the three channels, Red, Green and Blue. Now each channel in essence is grayscale information it's not color itself. But when it's reproduced and combined it produces color images. So if I were to actually go and take this photo and split out the channels we would see, if I split them out to Red, Green and Blue this is the information contained in the Red Channel. Here's the information contained in the Green Channel. A lot of information even though there's very little green in this photo there's still a lot of information in this green because green contributes to red and blue to create the colors that we see and here's the blue channel. Now obviously for this photo if I can get back to it, red and blue predominate with whiteness, there's mostly a tail here or red and blue. So if I go into Blend Ranges, again I'm going to blend on lightness here so I'm going to gray channel alone, I'm going to reduce my preview window size here and then start manipulating the values. So by dragging these top arrows in what I'm saying is that everything above this level channel by 156, everything above that I want to progressively blend towards total transparency. Now I can also drag this bottom arrow in which means if I set that at 200 that means everything above 200 will be fully transparent, so my blend range it's almost like a gradient. My blend range is from 155 to 200 and then everything above 200 is fully transparent. So if you want to gradual blend I would set the bottom slider further away from the top slider and if you want an abrupt blend or no blend at all, if you just want to cut everything off and set them to the same value. So in this case I'm in essence saying everything below 61 progressively fades to transparency in terms of brightness and everything above 154 is totally transparent. So int his case that's the white, all the white becomes, disappears because its in this range right here, you see where my mouse is moving, that's where that white is in terms of lightness. The flagpole disappears because- but not completely it progressively blends out because it's on the darker end of the spectrum. Now you can see the lower layer which is the P51 shining through because this layer is what I'm altering. If reset this top control, change the lower level, what I get is a way to blend up, basically I'm saying I want the underlining layer to blend into this layer based on these parameters. And again here because we're in the grayscale channel we're based on lightness. Alright now let's select the red channel and work with, I need to get those all the way to zero otherwise I'll still my underlining layer, let's choose the red channel and try to blend out this red. Now you see the flagpole disappears because there is information in the red channel that helps draw flagpole but then if I reduce the top end of the red, a lot of this red disappears. Alright I think we can wrap this lesson up, that's a basic introduction to Blend Ranges, have fun and experiment with it.