Lessons

Lesson Info

Blend Modes

well this section we're goingto start delving into one of my top favorite topics which is layers some long time users of photo shop remember it almost seems ludicrous for new people to think about the first two versions of us off where there weren't layers and had to everything on one flat canvass it was like a whole different world it was remember I used to teach a beginner's class and we did a technique that showed howto make like a text with a drop shadow and it was like twenty seven steps and if you made a mistake halfway through we were totally messed up had to start all over again because there was no going back so the fact that we have all these options layers is tremendous and it keeps getting better so they're against it said before the break on this is not a welcome tto layer sessions off you're completely laywer zahra foreign topic to you this is not the class for you because I'm not going to talk in great detail about what layers are but more key functions and some shortcut...

s and ways to take advantage of them and some of this will be a quick review for some of you I'm sure because you probably played with some of these functions but won't make sure we're basically arming ourselves with those many tools and options as we possibly can and the first one I won't talk about is blend modes are bled most now is the topic of landlords and this is a very powerful part of photo shop and there are some people I think that want toe understand like what is this blend mode actually do I personally have never been one of those because there's so many of them and some of the when you read the photoshopped help files in fact actually quoted in my hand out just the description from the help file for a couple of functions and it's kind of like you read it like what because it talks about thie underlying layer on the target layer blending with the luminosity blah bitty blah so if you have not are not terribly familiar with blend modes and this to me is one of the simplest ways to experiment see what they do all I did was I created a whole series of colored squares I made sure I had white black and gray as part of them and I put them all in a group so that I can change the blend mode of all of them at the same time whenever you put something in a group which looks especially like a folder but it's called a group that means the blend mode you change will automatically change all of the layers inside that group so by going through and saying what does multiply do you can see for example multiply makes white go away and black stays the same and every other color gets darker and this is my quick very non technical overview and I'm showing you the two or three ones I use more than any others and then I'll show you a way that I can try them all just to see what they do screen mode is kind of the opposite of multiply black goes away clearly white stays and the other colors is almost like you're projecting them who some people think of the screens if he had two slides in the projector and that's how it would look and then overlay it depends on the color some will get lighter some will get darker some will go away completely like gray and same with hard light you'll see gray goes away white on black don't change colors changed slightly so how do we start to implement all this kind of stuff with one of the ways that I still do today even though I have a relatively good understanding what the different blend most do in some cases I know I need to go to this specific blend mode but a lot of other cases I am not one hundred percent certain so I'm going to go in here let's put this personal back to normal and let's just pick let's go with this yellow one on ly use that one just so we can see some ways that you can take advance so this is the letter I want to work on tuck before the break about the keyboard shortcut for changing the opacity there's also a couple of anderson keyboard shortcuts to experiment with blend moz if you're in the motive I don't know which blend moti use and I want to just try it and see I would first of all make sure I already know I do but just to be sure I'm gonna press b for the move tool to make sure I'm telling photoshopped whatever I keyboard shortcut I press next I want to target my layer not a painting tool and I press shift and the plus sign and as you do it goes down through the list of blend modes so this way you don't have to even look at the layers panel you could just look at the layer you're working on and each time you press it you'll see it changes and if there's one that you suddenly go oh that's interesting what is that then you're gonna go over and go oh it's something called divide if you're zipping through them as I tend to do and you something go wait a minute what was that a second ago shift minus goes back the other way this is the really quick way to kind of tuggle through the blend mose and see what you have there are keyboard shortcuts for these so if you know you want to go to a specific blend mode there is a shortcut combination you can use so it always starts the same as always option shift or all shift and then a letter so depending on the blend mode for example em for multiply and for normal ofer overlay h for hard like those of the four that I used probably mohr so I remember those ones off the top of my head other ones are a bit more of a stretch because it's not the first letter it's like the second letter or something like that so I'm not again suggesting we need to go through and memorize each of these but for me personally I spent a lot of my time switching between normal and multiply or normal and overlay and instead of every time going back to the top of the layers panel to change it manually this is a very nice way to do it on the fly later on we talk about masking techniques that knowledge of those keyboard shortcuts are hugely important because more working on mass switch between overlay and normal is a key technique and it's the same keyboard shortcut luckily it just means you target either the layers panel or the brush tool first before pressing the keyboard shortcut so let's look at a away example or two of how we could start taking advantage of these blend modes this file I have right here is a camera ross smart object which will also be talking about later on which simply means if I double click on it I can go back to um okay let's let me take that back this one obviously isn't because of the way I set this up so that will get on that part later that's really not terribly important to me get back here ok so what I want to do is I want to apply a filter to this and I thought this kind of photograph the way that brightness it might actually lend itself to having a lens flare and because it's already smart that means the filter is smart but you see you see as I do this if I go render lens flare the way this filter works is that you position it somewhere and you click okay and then if you don't like it you have to double click and go back each time if I'm just trying to move it around in full screen size each time after double click on it and then move it and then click okay so I thought perhaps there was this is what some people would jokingly call on old school method because with smart filters is not perhaps as necessary but I still like it because of the options that gives me so what I would do is add a new layer which I would fill with black then I run the plans for it I might actually still make this a smart object just so I have the further option of editing the settings but now we're going to go render and then lens flare and I'm going to position it roughly in the middle and just decide which of these options that I like there's various choices I often use this one and click okay so I have this big lens flare that sitting on top of the background and as you can see I can drag it around but then I just got this big black box around it so this would be an example where if I jump right to the screen blend mode screen is always going to remove black so now the black goes away and now I have a lens flare that I can literally just dragged wherever I want instead of each time having to double click go to that little small preview move it click okay this gets just a movable lens flare that I can move around now the on ly thing that sometimes happened and luckily it hasn't happened in this case just by the nature of the colors his with certain color combinations when you change the blend mo to screen you can actually see a very fine line where the edge of that layer like in this case if you look it would normally be uh this back to normal for a second so what the line would be right here where this ends and I put it back to multiply excuse me screen I should say you see you can't really see it but I have had occasions where that has happened and you can see that you moved too far you it becomes kind of obvious so in a case like that what I would do is this I'm going to make a new document and one of things we can do in the new document is I want to initially make the document the same size there's my existing won instead of trying to guess by school the preset menu it shows whatever files are open and when I choose it it automatically picks the right size but what I want to do is make it even bigger than that just to make sure so I'm gonna take this fifty nine and make it seventy five and take this thirty nine and make it fifty so now I'm gonna have an image which is much larger than my other document now on this one I fill it with black convert to a smart object do my lens flare and now I do is take this whole document drag it on to the other one and you'll see it's much much bigger so I would first of all change the blend mode to screen now is probably bigger than it needs to be let's just see how they could see its way bigger so I'd scale the numbers unnecessary larger but I'm going to go at least this big so now I still have this movable lens flare but because that black layer is falling over the edge is now I can move it much further without any worry about suddenly seeing a line so clearly my math was a lost cause I made it way too big but you see the idea and also means that the lens flare is actually bigger because by default when you use the lens flare filter it tries to be make reference of the size of the document so because this talking with much bigger actually a much bigger lens flare this way including this cool reflection right near the edge that I wouldn't have got otherwise so actually like the way this turned out that's what we like to go a happy accident where I didn't actually intend to do that but now that I have it it's actually kind of interesting and the smart objects still comes with it or the smart filter so if I did need to go in and tweak the results of the filter little bit I still could and now I have my nice movable effect that also can be edited and also means if I have a whole series of photos I want to use it I just drag this one layer into the next document and pick up from there I'm all about any time like an we use and recycle existing work instead of starting again each time then that's a good thing so the fact that this is so big in fact I really wanted to I could even save this file just by itself as some foul name like really large lens flare and the only time I needed I could just place it in and I'm good to go so I don't not building it from scratch every time and when we talk briefly about actions in the first class sometimes we can save ourselves times by making an action but the thing that remember actions is they're very literal so if you record in action that does these five steps this is exactly the result you get every single time whereas if you make a document like this is just a big black dock with the lens flare I can drag it into a different document and then still tweak the results so I'm not always stuck with oh well this is the specific result I'm going to get every time I'm not going to bother saving it in this case but let's open this photograph so here's a challenge that I realize I was faced with and when we talk later on I think it's tomorrow probably about camera on camera smart objects I love the ability to continue to edit on camera but it does present a bit of a barrier to me sometimes so I'm going to just make a couple of kind of initial adjustments to this document and I have my preference set up to make this this thing called a camera smart object which again we'll get into more detail but now I want to do a little bit of adjusting and the way I would have done it in the past before the world of camera smart objects is dodging and burning where I just wantto say use the dodge tool to brighten up these areas little bit used the burned tool it's already fairly dramatic I wanted to be even more dramatic want to sculpt his faysal bit to make it everything is dark a little darker and things like that well the problem is if I go and try and use either the dodge or burn tool you'll see I get this little symbols as you can't do that because you can't work directly on a smart object is well not possible if you try to it'll tell you you mustrt asteroids that that's a bad word pasteurizing means you're going to take away the whole advance giving it being a smart object so if you ever see that don't click okay please even though it's prompting you the little ok button is glowing going click me click me is like no clicked cancel with some tools I can add a blank layer so for example if I was trying to this with a spot healing brush you'll see the spot healing brush has a function called sample all layers unfortunately the dodge and burst burn tools don't so this is the barrier I would the roadblock I would run into is if I wanted to use dodge and burn I can't do it directly onto or I should say I can't do it onto a blank layer so some people solution is to either rasa rise a smart object or make a duplicate copy that's rast arise we'll either one of those eliminates the advantage of it being smart and the fact that I can still edit it so what I want to do is the equivalent of dodging and burning in a way that doesn't lose my ability to continue to edit this in camera because if I did any of those other options for example if I what some people would probably do is duplicate this layer and then do this horribly bad thing called rast arise now it means that if they make any changes that this top layer the bottom layer has got nothing to do with it and then you can't edit anymore so I don't want to do that instead what I do is add a blank layer and we're going to fill it with fifty percent gray so initially it's covered up when I changed the blend mode to hard light hard light is telling photos off anything is fifty percent gray disappear anything that's either slightly darker or lighter make that appear so the trick here is we're not actually using the dodge and burnt all using the brush tool to do the equivalent of dodging and burning so if I take my brush to will be for brush and I look at my settings real quick I've got black is my foreground color I'll make it a little bigger but the opacity is really high so if I went like this it just looks really bad looks like I did like black war paint on his face so I need to be at a really low opacity like ten twenty percent so I pressed two for twenty and now when I do this work this is the equivalent of burning each time I go over the same brush stroke is getting darker and darker is yet to be careful that you're not going paint paint paint paint in the same place or else you're going to end up with like one hundred percent black so any place and I'm deliberately going a little more now so you can see what I'm doing I'm going to go into all the areas that I want to dark and at first is going to look bad because I'm deliberately first of all I'm overdoing it but I'm also there's one more step I want to do eventually but for now I want you to see what's happening so I go through all these areas that I want to burn and make darker whatever they might be and just so you can see what happens if I swapped my color now I'm painting with white so that will be the equivalent of dodging making things lighter so I'll go into some areas and again at first it looks way overdone because well it is but again I want to see what's happening here now when I say it's way overdone it is but that's actually not a bad idea to start this way because if you first went and did the stuff I'm going to last if you started that way the fact would be so subtle you'd be going I can't really tell us in the right place so they just have to live with the fact that at first it's gonna look way overdone but I'm not I wouldn't stop and then go ted look it's perfect because clearly it's not so the last step would be to take this whole layer so I press v for the move tool and say three for thirty percent capacity and now when I turn on can see the difference here is with the effect here's without so it's still noticeable but it's way less noticeable than when I was first painting with a layer of a hundred percent capacity so the process is phil fifty percent black change the blend moto hard light use a paintbrush with either low capacity or black or white and then lower the opacity now just to show you what it actually looks like this is what my dajun burn layer would look like if I turn back to normal so it's just a bunch of different shades of late different shades of gray light grey and dark way does the equivalent of dodging and burning but the point of doing this besides the fact that you can because you can't with a smart object is the main reason why I use this is the following if I go back and put this back the way it wass I've done all this work and let's pretend I did a lot more than just a few brushstrokes I spent a bit of time trying to really tweet this dramatic portrait and make it look the way I want and then I decide I need to go back to camera raw and change the white balance or convert to black and white or something else any other method all that work would have been lost because we have been based on well you rass arise this layer at this point because I didn't rast arise this is using that hard light blend mode on top of whatever's underneath it so one of the advantages of camera smart objects is we'll see when I double click I can go back here and let's just do something really obvious convert the grayscale and make this more dramatic look like this click okay and as soon as I do that it is goingto update for me and the dodge in bern layer is still in effect it doesn't care that it's now grayscale inter instead of color it's just saying darkened enlightened whatever's underneath me now remember before when I talked about making sure you turn off that script event manager apparently I said that but I didn't actually do it because that was causing me grief there so that's just to review a good example of why it's so far remember turn it off because it was kind of messing me up for a second until I realized what was happening so this is why anytime someone says I wish there was a way to dodge in bern in a non destructive manner there is it's just not using the dodge in bern tools which is unfortunate which there was and it's always on my little photoshopped wishlist that I hope in the next version will be a sample all layers but I'll be like hey that's so much easier but for now there isnt so this is the nicest quibbling is the ability to keep this linkage back too cameras you can do whatever you want in terms of exposure and everything else and this make something really obvious any change I make it's always going to still have that dodge and burn and you can keep going with it of course if you realize now that I've changed it I need to do even more work over here he just go back to the slayer and continue with the same process of painting with different shades of black and white or very like percentages I should say of black and white so that's one of those tech things have been around for quite a while but it's a really nice effective way to control it and still preserve all that nice editing ability that camera gives us okay there's a function in photo shop and this is again not new but it solves an interesting dilemma that used to be a problem but probably still is a problem that aren't aware of it but it's got its potentially one of the most confusing things because the way to use it I think is not as obvious as it should be but like anything else once you know how to use this like okay and then you start doing so here is basically the scenario I have this photo of ah waterfall in puerto rico and I took another photograph of just some textured wall and I added a mass to it that looks like this it's a serious of filters and now I want to punch a hole so you can see through the wood to the waterfall on behind normally I would do that with a layer mask and I could the problem is this if you do that to you make a selection out of it and then we'll wait a minute I can't mask it there's already a mask there and this is where it starts to become a problem I mean in theory I suppose I could go to the layer mask and in that selection fill with black and then you'll see it's working it's see through so you could successfully argue well isn't that what you want to do well yes but the challenge and anyone who's a designer or it worked in photo shop who has clients or people that make suggestions you won't run to this problem where they look and say oh that's perfect can you just something like change the font well if all I have is a layer mass that looks like this the answer is no because that's just paint on a mass that's not a typeface so hopefully I could either undo or paint over it and so this is where the problem lies and this is the whole lead up to a widely would use this function is I want this functionality of making it look like a punched out whole butt basing it on this type player so I can continue to edit it and the technique we used to do this is called knockout it's been around for quite a long time but like a lot of people have tried it and there's one what I think is incredibly vital piece of information that if you dig down far enough and help out probably says it somewhere but to me it's not obvious enough so the way we access is a double click and it brings up this layer style dialog box and we don't want to worry about any of these things on the left hand side you see right here there's a man who says knock out see that right in the middle and right now it says none so the first time we tried this I'm like okay so I guess I just have to change it too shallow and then nothing happened and I turn the preview on and off and still nothing happened okay I guess I have to change it to deep and I turned the preview on off and still nothing happened that's like so apparently what I mean there's really no obvious that just says okay I want a knockout fine why isn't it working while the trick is and this is the part that almost everyone misses including me the first time is an art for it to actually be seen you have to take the phil opacity and lower it to zero I love stuff like that why there's probably I'm sure there's some engineer that would tell you that's because the linen has them and explain why but now you know so if you ever try to do knock out it's not working then this is why now the different shallow indeed this is where it gets a little interesting as well you can see right now the knockout is causing this text to be see through but I'm not seeing the forests and waterfall I'm just seeing transparency so it's close but there's something that's still not working is what should happen or what I want to have happen is I want this to be seen underneath and the other part that they don't really tell you is knock out if you want to knock out multiple layers and see one layer at the bottom the layers that are involved in the knockout part of things have to be in a group and this is you put them in a group now it works so there's too little gutches that get almost everyone one phil opacity zero two for most situations is very few that this is not the case it works best if you put the layers inside a group now the reason for all this work is now if you do this and you show your client and they go oh I love it but can you change it to upper and lower case then you say why yes I can for my minimum charge of five hundred dollars I'd be happy to do that for you because now you can go in and this is still a type player so you can edit it in any way you want except I'm saying that and for something they can see that anything I want to do I can change it I could change the typeface I could do whatever but it's still causing that knockout because I've told that to happen this is not I recognize an everyday situation but for those circumstances were especially when you're involved with type many people I've met that have asked me a question I've got to a certain point in some technique they're trying with their responses oh well I'll have to live with that or I'll have to rast arise it because I can't figure out a way to preserve edit ability and get the effect that I want and even though it's not one I use that often it's in the back of my mind knowing that in the right circumstance this knockout will be exactly what I want because I still have keeping all the edit ability I wanna get this is still a separate layers so I can transform it if I want I can edit the font all those things but still remember and all else fails if you look at it go okay this isn't working at all you just go back double click on this and take out the knock out its no way at no point did I have to say oh well that's my permanent effect now so years ago I had an interesting conversation with someone who wanted teo do this effect where they wanted to make something looks like a filmstrip with the little sprockets so they wanted holes in it and at first what they were doing was taking one little tiny marquis selection and going delete and then moving it over going delete and then moving over and although that worked there were two problems with that one it took a long time secondly the spacing between each of the squares was totally up to their random did I move it far enough but the biggest problem of all is if they looked at layered said gosh I wish all those holes were bigger or smaller kind of out of luck so they don't want to say they challenged me but they kind of said I can't imagine there's an easier way and of course my brain goes on there must be so I put my creative thinking cap on and went I'm sure there's gotta be a way to do it so this is what I came up with this first of all I need to have a much smaller size here and way back in the distant memories there used to be these typefaces that we had that were called things like ding bats and web dings and all those sort of things I thought somewhere in here I probably have that sold me to start the type so I confined and the only thing is I don't remember what the letter is I should have written is down but let's just do it real quick how I literally do it when I don't know he just pressed the letter and then backspace until you find the one you want I think it's one of these ones down here maybe uh I know there's one I just have to find it ah gosh dave right next time meant note to self right down what shape it actually is okay so just for the perfect demonstration we're gonna use asterix instead of stars because I don't want to spend forever trying to find it um what's not good okay let me go back step here that's why okay we'll do it with stars because I'm not going to spend forever trying to find the right sprocket shaped because for the purpose of death of our thing here it will still work so I just press a whole bunch of h is making the line left and then he's a keyboard shortcut we will spend more time finding later which is optional turn the right arrow key to spread them out size that I want and pretending for a moment this is a new style of film that has star shaped sprockets instead of what we have here same thing philip asi to zero land if you see in this case it's working so now I have the effect that I wanted of the see through hole I could duplicate to make a second set of those weirdly strange sprocket shapes but the van biggest advantage me again is that now if I take those I can go on to do any kind of editing I want including saying they need to be much smaller or further apart or whatever it might be because it's still type based but it's still having that knockout effect so I apologize that I forgot to write down apparently what the key is to get an actual rectangle is supposed to that but it just shows you the idea of how we can implement knockout in different situations for me a lot of the time it's based on type but not always we could also with shapes and things of that nature okay here's one that I do use a lot more though which is blend of sliders another function I probably talked about on creative live multiple times because I think it's so valuable and yet I still see people using other methods which to me are way more complicated I liketo have the blend of sliders as part of my sort of repertoire of things to try and if it doesn't work I'll try something else but in many cases it saves me time or lets me do things in a more creative way that I could do otherwise so first of all let's do this I'm going to take this texture that I have it's just a photograph I took in a hotel of ah wallpaper I thought was kind of interesting I'm gonna place it in photo shop because it's a camera file it starts here and I'm going to sort of arbitrarily pick some numbers I don't really know yet which ones I want normally I'm not a big fan of scaling anything upwards but because this is a texture is gonna be over laid on top of a big deal and then I want to access these blend most here's the way blend most work excuse me blend if I should say if I chose blend melinda says take this entire texture and and mix it with whatever is underneath it and just some global way overall but I want to do is be a little more selective about so changing the blend mode in this case really isn't going to help me if I double click on it it comes up with the laywer style in this area that's just called blending options and write down the bottoms and called blend if sliders and it has this layer layer I'm on underlying layer whatever's underneath it so if I say what there's those flowers underneath there if I want them to sort of start toe pushed through if I take the underlying layer triangle and start to move it'll say take everything the darkest areas of this photo and push it through so I didn't have to make any selection I'm not doing any masking I'm just telling it make every pixel that's darker than this see through and if I go to the other and say take the light pixels you see those ones in this case the sky and the clouds start to push through or I could go the other way and say take this layer this won't work as well just because there's not too many shades in here but a certain point you'll see it'll start to just make me uncle the other ways you can see the little better see how now the background color is disappearing but the other part is staying this is going to be completely variable depend on what you're doing so if I had another photograph that all kinds of shades of color you would see it more if I had something that was more black and white so it's going to vary every time you do and I'll show you a couple different examples of what happens but the main thing we want to understand here is when we move this underlying layer at a certain point if I get a little closer here let's do this zoom in a little closer she can start to see what's happening in certain point often the edges look very kind of you cut and dry and jagged and we want them to be a little more subtle so the trick is our good old friend to make better key once again option altar you click on this triangle it splits into two halfs and now as you do this you can see you can start to get more of gradual effect as opposed to one that's quite so cut and dry unfortunately does not do that by default you must remember I have to click to split this slider triangle to half that creates this little almost like transitional zone and very often what it means it's a combination of things where you say I'm going to take the top trying to do it this way and the bottom triangle and on top of this of course you can still say I wonder would look like if in addition to that I also did a blend mode so now we're getting this really interesting effect that would have taken a lot longer if I said get out some masking tool and start creating a layer mask it's a little more arbitrary cause based on the shades of the players involved but for me it's something I often try because it's so fast I'm going to say what happens if I also think oh that's kind of interesting or sometimes not now again we'll talk more about these cameras smart objects later on but because both of these are edible I could for example I've already blended this texture in now if I double click on it and say well maybe it would just look better if I convert this to gray scale and made it quite a bit darker here and lighter there and you know just sort of played with it a little bit to see and one soon as I click okay it's goingto update with the fact that it's in multiply multiply mode and I had these blend if sliders applied now for some of you that have versions before c s six there's a little bit of a warning label here is a new thing they added six was this little symbol you see here to the right of the layer that reminds you you have changed something in early versions of photo shop if you played with blend modes and clicked ok visually on the screen you'd see something different but there was nothing in the layers panel to help you remember so don't be surprised if you have a version before see essex if you play with this in a certain point go what happened to my image this is fairly new reminder to tell you this is the kind of thing that you will see happen changed on indication I should say of something has changed now another example of where you might try using this is I have put some texan here and this is a weird fought that I picked apparently in this fond f sir backwards I'm not sure the theory of that concept of why you'd want that but I'll leave it there for now and I want to think to myself what would this look like if this part of the fbl were behind or looked like it was behind the flower while normally my first thought was go get a layer mask do some painting but unless the circumstances are very easy that could still take you a few minutes I want to see really quickly is this this even look would have even look good if I did that now before I even attempt it with the blended sliders they're the circumstances have to be correct or I should say that should have to be ideal for it even have a chance for example if I chose to make the word flower white or pale yellow it probably wouldn't work very well because there's not that much contrast between the word and the yellow petals so there are some situations where it wouldn't be worth trying but because in this case I deliberately made sure that the word was quite dark that I double click on it and he's had to think about and say well I don't want you doing that this layer because I move this slide it'll just disappear completely because it's all black we'll take the underlying layer and start to move now if you're watching where my mouse's don't watch over here this is where I'm looking to see what's happening at a certain point as I move it you can see all of a sudden you look at that right about there so I can't go this is the only downside is this is the reality the blend of sliders is I love the way it looks here but now I've lost part of the type and that's just the reality of the colors that are there but what I do you use this for is exactly this is what it was what does it what does it look ok with the word looking like it's behind the flower if it does at least I know now it's worth the extra time to make a really accurate mask so for me the blend of sliders among other things also become a means where I can just test something before I spent a lot of time going off to boom zoom especially involves like hair in front of something and there's all the mass becomes a lot more challenging in many cases the blend of sliders will do it really quickly what you need to remember about the blend of sliders is what you see is what you get there's no like well now let me tweak some other button and have it work better no that's it that's what you're gonna get because of the color relationship between these layers so sometimes you look at someone say it's maddeningly close to being perfect unfortunately there's no hidden well if I just move this it'll suddenly get better most of time it's kind of like a well but I still think it's worth trying because I'd rather if there's even a chance of it working in five seconds I'd rather do that than spend twenty five minutes masking question e I would approach differently if I decided I like this and you know that's kind of nice instead of going in and fussing over yellow pixels which I would be inclined to dio I just duplicate the flowers in just mask off the part that got yeah and of course and there's always multiple ways but but even there starting with the blend of sliders first to see if you even like the concept of having the texan behind is this is where I used it as almost don't want to say proof of concept because I make the sound way more you know fancy but it's a technique where I can go before I do any of those methods to fix it then this is the first thing I try now I will say though the on ly potential downside that method of duplicating pixels is fine unless you got to a certain point then thought now that I've done that I need to edit the original camera information now the colors won't so I actually do it instead of just saying it out loud because you feel like you're talking about so let's say for sake of argument that I just did that I just duplicated the pixels let's put this back to normal and then drag this appear so looks pretty good but and this is the reason why if in a pinch if I need to I'll do it this way but here's the one reason why I would debate about doing it that way as opposed to trying to do like a mask because now if I go back to camera aw and say I want to really change the exposure best not I'm deliberately being dramatic to see you see the problem that's gonna happen is when I say this one save save save now suddenly it's kind of a giveaway because sully those don't match up anymore and I mean it worse I could redo it but my gold and everything I do is to try and eliminate as much extra step is possible so even though that if you knew for sure that the flowers were finished in there absolutely just duplicating apart it's quick and easy it works if there's even a chance of having to continue to edit that's when potentially runs into this kind of problem so as long as people know that going in you know I have plenty of time said I was going to duplicate that those pixels up there but if there's an option of saying but if I do a mask instead then I'm not playing with I'm preserving the ability let's just put that way to edit color's what I meant was I duplicate the text flowers and then on the second one just mask that I'm glad you anyway because this this lead to a good discussion which some people think that's a quick solution and while it is in this particular case that's where it starts toe fall apart a little bit even duplicating the text part you still run into the same problem because you would have to rest arise it in order to clip out the flowers and then the text would be editable buy more where even if you did text and masking it still to text layers within if someone says he's a different thought I mean so there's always different solutions that all have their own little unique potential challenges any time you can just say one type player one mask one smart off that kind of thing it just means you're eliminating mohr of those potential out now I have to do this kind of thing so the reality photoshopped always multiple ways to do things but I'm always looking for the ways to give me the most options for containing added at any time so from the chat rooms column would like to know can you use blend ifs for manually creating hdr images in photo shop well I would answer by saying potentially but remembering that the nature of blended sliders they're vory global so say for example you had a photo of ah landscape where one bird one layer the sky was very white and the other one it was a very dark sky and you want to blend them if you double clicked it would say oh now will take all the white sky make it see through but if there was a white picket fence down here that would become see through too so that's the one potential problem is the blood of sliders air global so you can't say take just this one corner and do that I mean it but it's worth trying because in some such I've had somewhere I did that I'm like oh I'm gonna have the sky looks great now I would say it's probably a two out of ten chance that it's going to be perfect but considering it takes two and a half seconds to move a slider and go how does that look then the answer with a lot of things is potentially but it's hard to say without looking at of course the specific situation of which one you're doc what you know the colors are and everything else