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Using Blending Modes to Control Color

So these are the 27 blending modes. And whenever you're using blending modes, let me just select any layer. Listen, really matter which one, and you click on the drop down menu. You might have noticed those little dividers there. See them and I'll zoom in, just in case you can't see them little lines right there going across. Unfortunately, Adobe doesn't label them, so you can have to figure out what they dio. And what they do is, um, they are just the layers in different ways, the first to normal and to solve, um, essentially. And although it this layer here, I really don't blame the layers. There's no algorithm apply. The only way you can blend them is by bringing down the opacity. And that's how you would blend the layers in those two blending most that solves the other one in this solve is essentially the same as normal. But instead of fading smoothly, it creates his noisy, draining effect, s you reduce the opacity, and I'm not going to talk about all of them individually. But I ju...

st wantedto show you those two because they're sort of the different ones. If you're interested about finding out exactly what each of these blending modes does. I have, ah, video on my YouTube channel just roughly about 50 minutes where I talk about each individual one and what it does. So you guys gonna watch that if you like. Um, the next category is the dark and category. The dark and category makes it so that white and bright pixels disappear or become transparent. The opposite happens with the lightened group. The lighting group keeps the bright pixels but hides the dark pixels. Then we have the contrast group. The contrast group sort of applies both a darken and lighten, um, blending depending on the value of the pixels. And actually with most of these not all of them, I think, Uh oh. But all but two of these blending modes 50% gray gives you no result. It's invisible. And then, if it's darker than 50% gray, it applies a darkening effect. And if it's brighter than 50% gray, it applies a brightening effect with the Contras bunny mode. Then we have inversion that sort of creates sort of like special effects and things like that. It inverts colors and let's fun stuff but the ones that we're gonna be mainly concerned about this class and curves is the component group and specifically to color and luminosity. And even though we've been working with curves and we were in color correcting and we've been in all this one stuff we really haven't talked about, um what curved with the curves adjustment layer. That's to saturation when you're making adjustments, I'm gonna make a really extreme adjustment here on this image of that you could see created curves, adjustment layer and let me just bring this down. And I'm just gonna make a really, really, really extreme adjustment. You zoom in, you'll notice that we added some saturation. If you can't see that, you definitely will see it when we, um, change the blending more if we wanna use the curves adjustment layer and not affect color Onley movement Ah city. We can change the blending mode to luminosity, so watch what happens to his face. We're no longer going to affect the color, just the luminous values luminosity. We click, you see that the saturation went down. So when we're adjusting now, using a blending mode, we can adjust the image and Onley affect the luminous values and not affect the color of the image. So that makes the curves adjustment layer even that much more powerful because now you have even mawr targeted control. You have the targeted control because you can select the values that you want to adjust. You can select a layer mask and make a selection in a mask around a specific area. And now you can also use a blending mode to target either the color or luminosity. Or you can leave it at normal and target both. So, um, and the opposite of that will, of course, be color. So if I select color, I could go into the Red Channel, for example, and I can make adjustments and notice that the images and get brighter or darker. It just changes the color of the image. So that's how you could. You could also use this technique for color correcting. Maybe you're happy with the Contras that your image has. Maybe you don't have a washed out image, Um, but the colors don't work. You can change the blending mode to color and make your adjustments that way if you want to. In the examples, I had earlier. They needed some contrasts as well. So in that case, we needed to use both, um, color and luminosity, So we didn't change the blend mode. But what we're gonna do in the next examples is used color to, um, make a creative color correction color grading. So there's sort of two blending modes that we're gonna be looking at, and I have this composite here and one of my favorite color grades or color corrections to do it. I like movies. I'm a big fan of movies. You guys saw that post sort of, that. I did with the with the Bayer and any time I watched a movie, I want to do something in photo shop. And if you guys are fans of movies like I am, you guys will notice that currently one of the big popular Trans is a teal orange effect. You know, you see it everywhere, and some people hate it. It can be overdone if you've seen the movie transformers. I think it's overdone there, but it generally speaking, I like it. You see it a lot in summer blockbusters or in action movies, and what that is is basically a combination of blues and teals and reds and oranges. Resin oranges, air usually for the actor. Blues and teals are usually for the background in shadows, and the reason that that combination works is because orange and blue star opposite colors. When you put opposite color side by side, they tend to pop, and usually you want to make the actor stand out from the background so we can actually use curves in photo shop to create a movie look effect sort of speak. The first step would be to separate the skin tones from the rest of the image, because usually you don't want to apply teals and blues and all that to skin tones. I don't look very realistic, and they don't look very good unless says the effect that you're going for again. There's no right or wrong when you're doing creative color correction. It all depends on the story that you're trying to tell. So for my story, I really don't want any blues or Thiel's on her skin, so I'm just gonna do a quick selection around her skin. And if this were a real project, that probably would take a little longer and they think that will work for this example and actually let me subtract. So if you hold option, you subtract from a selection with the quick selection tool. So options to subtract or you click and drag to add to the selection. And I'm gonna create a curves adjustment layer, and this one is gonna adjust her skin tones. So we're gonna select color cause I really don't want to adjust the values just the color of her skin, so I'll call this one skin. Then I want another curves adjustment layer for the background. I can save myself some time and just press command J that's controlled and the PC to duplicate the layer. And I'll just called his background, and it's also the dress, but I'll just call it background, Um, but I wanted to obviously affect those areas and not the skin. If I click on the layer mask and you're going to the properties panel, you'll notice this invert button. You can click on it in the layer mass changes, so now I'm targeting the background and not the skin tones. If you want to get fancy, would keyboard shortcuts. You can also press command. I control I on the pc to invert and it's already said in the color blending mode. I'm gonna click on the, um, curves here, and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go into the Blue Channel and find some shadows like maybe in her dress click and drag up to add some blue and maybe going to the Red Channel and reduce red to get scion in the shadows. And you sort of start seeing how I'm not getting that like, cinematic look a little bit and I can keep making adjustments until I get what I want. For now, I'm just gonna leave it in that shade of blue again. We confined to knit as much as we want to. We can get the colors that we want, but again, we don't have too much time. So I'm gonna now select the skin tones and with the skin tones. Maybe I want to add more red to make her pop a little more and again, this is all subjective. You may not like the esthetic look of this, and that's OK, but if you learn the techniques, you can apply those techniques to whatever looks good to your eye. um you can click on the skin tones and at some red and maybe reduce the blues. And that's sort of like an orangey look. And you might be thinking, Know what? I think it needs a little more contrast. It needs to be, you know, more like film stock type of thing. So maybe we can go and create another curves adjustment layer. But we already worked in color. We don't want to mess with the color anymore. We already got the color the way that we want it so we can change the blending mode to luminosity. And we can just, for example, even selected preset. We can go and select something like strong contrast or medium contrast that's before and after, and we can maybe reduce the opacity and make any type of adjustments that we want. So now we have our image here that has that Ah, that blue orange of effect that you see in a lot of movies. Obviously, we did it in a couple minutes, but we can definitely find Tune it to get exactly the right blues and exactly the right skin tones that you like. But the steps are all the same. Select the areas that you want to effect by a specific adjustment layer or curves, adjustment layer and then tweet, layer mask and then said those curves adjustment layers to color to adjust colors and then one for luminosity. And I usually like to name my late layers, so I would call it luminosity if I can spell it. No, um, and something that I usually like to This put them all in a group, so I could always do a before and after and see what it looked like originally and sometimes at the end. If I think that the effect went too much like in this case, I can just maybe bring the on the opacity of all those adjustment layers. So it's a much more subtle effect, and usually that's That's the way I like to work. I like to push things really far, and then I usually bring the opacity down to zero and then increase it accordingly. And then you get a much more subtle effects. Let's before and after