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Lesson Info

Blend Modes for Creativity

right now, I'm gonna talk about the idea of textures. So when we looked in the beginning, when I had the portrait of the woman and the roses on top, that's fundamentally. Do what you do when you add textures to a photo. So if you've ever wanted to know how to add a grunge texture, this is how you do it. The other thing is, if you ever have a you've got a smooth gray background you shot on a grey Seamless. But afterwards you like man, I really wish that was a textured background. It was a grunge background. You would use blend modes to make it look like a textured background. Or, if you want to look an old photo or an antique photo, all of that stuff. So let me show you a couple examples here, let's grab this one. For example. We're gonna go for, like, a high key version. Um, all right, so beauty shot that I did. Okay, uh, I'm gonna grab. And I got this from a stock photo site. I got a new old book. Okay, so in this old book, I want to make it look like the girls faces etched on it. The...

re's no practical reason for this. It just maybe, or maybe you want to make it look like it's an old painting. You could make canvas, make it look like a pictures on canvas or painted on a book or or painted on stone or whatever it may be. So gonna grab this. These are gonna be the wrong size is Don't judge me. We're just gonna don't do this. It's just fast for right now, Okay? What I just did is I increased the size of the book, but all I do is that dragged it. That's not the way to do it, because it's gonna get pixel ization. So it would be better off making the main photo smaller to match. Or I use on one to interpret or up size my photos. So there's a plug in. There's a tool you can use if you've got a smaller file. Maybe you grabbed with your camera of when it was old or you grab from online. You can upsides those files that you have more pixels to work with. All right, so in this example, this is where you could play with blend modes for creative effects. Um, I know from experience that my first go to blend mode that I try with textures is multiply because what it did is in the dark and category, right? So I know that what's going to do is gonna compare to pixel side by side, and it will prioritise the darker ones. So I mean, that's exactly what it did. Write it, compared them side by side. And it says with this paper is darker than this background. Keep the paper, and so I could make it look like her face is on a book. I usually usually multiplies my go to for textures and sometimes overlay or soft light, but those tend to play more with contrast, and it messes it all up when you have really high key photo or really low key photo, so multiply. That's kind of in my head of what am I trying to do here? Eso texture. That would be my 1st 1 But let's take a look at another example. Okay, you could do textures of the book, or here's an example with grunge. Okay, so I took a picture of this guy. Okay? I took a picture of this guy and ah, it's fine. But like it's it's missing something like it's kind of boring. I want to try something different, and part of what I would do is a little bit of color grading. I had mentioned this. I've just taught a class on color grading. I'd play around with it, make it a little moody, or maybe add some blue to the shadows, are warming up and make it look old, because right now it's it's too normal for me. Maybe I look at this and I like, Oh, I like his his kind of rugged look. I want there to be a texture on the background or over this photo. So what I do is whenever I travel, I take my camera and it's funny because it would be like the Eiffel Tower. And then I'm shooting my feet because I'm looking for the texture at my feet or the texture on the wall next to me. But I'm looking for high resolution textures and shoot most of them myself, so there are many free textures online search, free texture, pack or free high rez texture. Pack on Google and it will bring up tons of options. Just check when you download them. Sometimes on websites like deviant art, for example, they'll say they're free to use except for commercial purposes. So you just gotta get to check with their rules are and some of them just say, completely free to use. So this is one of those that I found online that said completely free to use. All right. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna drag and drop that texture, OK? Someone drag and drop that texture. What I do is I grabbed the move tool, and it is Click it over. Okay. All right. Um, again, this is where you run into the problems. The reason I put this up here is this is why I shoot my own. Because when I am searching online, my camera that I shoot with all the time is 50 megapixels. And so what happens is I'm not gonna find textures that are 50 megapixel, so I tend to shoot my own, and it creates more variety. But I'm looking for, like, us concrete or peeling walls or anything like that. So again, don't do that. Um, if you if you needed toe upside the texture use on one. They have a resize tool. It works great. Um, okay, so in this example, same thing I'm going to play within the three that I try is multiply overlay or soft like that. Those are the ones that are my go to so I can click. Let's try, Multiply. They made picture too dark. So in my brain, I tend to use multiply more when the pictures later. Then when it's darker, it's basically since it's in the dark and category. If it's already dark, everything gets dark. So it's real dark. So that's why I don't use that one. Let's try self light. Not that one works a little bit better. Let's try overlay a little bit better, much like in so you know, you gotta you gotta kind of play with it and figure out what the effect is you're going for. I'm gonna try soft light on. That was kind of close because what I want is I don't actually want on his face. I went on the background. If you look at it, it, like, ended up on the back on a put texture there. So now if you only want the texture on the background. This is where you've got to figure out how you want to do your masking. Do you want to just paint it off of him, which you can dio, or do you want to try making some masks toe block it off into their other classes that go into masking more in depth? I don't have time to go into that here, so let me I would add a layer mask. I'm just gonna paint it off of him. Let's let's keep it simple. Someone got my black brush when a painting off of his face off of his jacket. And like I said, I could be more careful. But we're just going riel real rough here so I can give him a grunge background when he was not on a grunge background. And then, if you watch my class on color grading, I can come in and unite thes because right now they're kind of like I want to make him look like they're together. So what I might do is, I might add, just a little bit of blue to the shadows, something like this, and let's de saturate the whole picture. Let's play with contrasts, so so I can add texture to the background. Make a look cool. A word to the wise is when you were playing with textures. Pay attention to the fact that if the texture has a color, it will affect your photo, especially if you play with multiply, overlay or soft like, because it's including color in that formula. So when I work with textures, I d saturate them before I apply them to the image. Unless in the example of the book where that book is, I wanted that color to show up because I wanted it to look like it was on old was on an old book. Otherwise, if you took a picture of peeling yellow paint and you did that for this guy, the entire background would be yellow. So typically, when I'm working with colors, I d saturate them. If I want to add our textures when I want to add color, I added back in later, and I called her grade it instead of just leaving the color in there. So there's another Texas. So far, we've done like a texture to make something look like it's painted most often for me. This is if I want something to look like an old painting because I confined Ah, canvas texture or untold book texture or something like that and apply it. This is typically if I want the grunge look or a texture on the background and then we give you one other examples. Okay, go. One other example. I'm gonna close this girl, and this one was clean up. Great. All right, so one other example can actually be to go in a totally different direction creatively. So I took this picture and I was holding stuff in front of my lens trying to make it look dreamy. And it's like it kind of works. I was actually shooting through a plant that they had a dead plant. I was on the table and it kind of looks cool. But the whole point of this was supposed to be really romantic and dreamy, and I'm, like, kind to get in there. I'm not quite and part of it that would help would be color toning, make it a little bit dreamier, but I could add other details to the frame. So I decided for this one dreamy would be to add some lens blur. Um, you can take pictures like this so so easily you can take, uh, Christmas lights. Do you focus your lands when you when you d focus that you want it so that the bubbles get bigger, not smaller, It will go the other way. Or if it's raining outside on your windshield, No pull up someplace, let it gather on the windshield and have it so that there's like, um, you know, street lights and stuff in the background and do the same thing with focus and get that same blur. What's nice is you can tone this any color that you want because it doesn't matter what the colorist. So in this case, um, let me just wrote to this one. I'm gonna drag and drop it on top of this photo, okay? And so it's like roughly the same size should be the same size here, and we're going to do the exact same thing. Multiply overlay software to try one of these is your kind of my go to lets I multiply. Remember, it's a dark and one, and if the whole picture supposed to be light, it's in the dark and category so I don't I don't think I want it darker. You could try Layton screen See like screen is the opposite of Multiply. So that the same thing, just the other direction. So like that could work. If I backed off my capacity, you just had it a little bit on and let's try our overlay. And softly, I think like soft light starts getting close to where I want it. But of course I can always back off my capacity. So something like this, and then if those circle lines are little bit to crisp, I can always blur it. It's supposed to be blur like That's the point of it, so I can filter, blur Goshen, blur and just soften it. Try this right there. Let's pump up my opacity a bit. And then, of course, I can shift the colors painted off of different areas of the photo rotated around so I could have maybe less colors on her face. But this is if you want to do something really dreamy and soft. I also will do this if there's a really ugly background, some really ugly background element that I couldn't get out of the shot because then I could just, like, paint over it like Hayes and then add this the BoE carb okay into it. And then and then it looks like it was dreaming instead of like all that trash can was really ugly or whatever. So so the point of this section is anything that's textures. It's blend modes that you want to try, and it's usually multiplies. Sometimes screen. And then I do overlay and soft light. There's the ones that I usually try for textures, but texture doesn't have to be grunge. It can be on a book of canvas, or it could be like environmental effects.