Advanced Blending in Photoshop

Photoshop offers blending options unsurpassed in the design industry in your “Layer Style” dialog box, you will first find “General Blending” options, which are often enough for any task. Experiment with the Blend Modes and their opacity to see just how incredibly flexible the normal Blending Options can be.

To find your advanced blending options in Photoshop, double-click a layer or click the “Add a Layer Style” icon at the bottom left of your Layers palette, and then choose “Blending Options.” Your “Layer Style” dialog box will appear.

At the bottom of the Layer Style box, you will find, under “Advanced Blending,” something called the “Blend If” tool. What is the Photoshop “Blend If” tool, exactly?

Blend If is a “smart” blending tool. You can use it to blend images or create a more transparent image with almost infinite precision. This one tool is so flexible and handy it behooves any serios Photoshop designer to learn to use it, and use it well.

To experiment with advanced Photoshop layering, you’ll need something to work on. So first bring up a photo inside Photoshop, then create another layer with something on it.

On the bottom of your Layer Style box, you will find the “Blend If” settings.

Choose either gray, red, green or blue inside the drop-down Blend If menu, then use your slider bars to control the opacity of the layer you highlighted or the layer underneath.

Dragging the “white” slider left will diminish the whites or highlights, and the layer underneath will show through.

You will quickly see how blending each color affects the image. You can use this versatile feature, for example, to replace a washed-out sky with a nice blue sky, blending the transparency to a gnat’s eyebrow.

Try working back and forth from layer to layer, using the blending options on your Layer Style palette. To achieve a particularly soft blend, hold down your ALT key as you move the slider.

By dragging the bottom layer’s white slider to the left, its lightest colors appear over the image.

If you drag the “black” slider to the right, the darkest colors disappear and the image below appears. Dragging the underneath layer’s black slider will bring out the darkest colors from the bottom image.

To merge your blended layers when you’re finished, so that any further styling will be applied equally, click Layer in your top menu, then either Merge Down, Merge Group, Merge Visible or Flatten Image.

If you’re the kind of person who loves to learn and master a subject of interest, try out all the various permutations available in your Layer Style box’s Advanced Blending palette, under “knockout.” Right away, you’ll see how useful the three options in the Knockout menu itself can be: None, Shallow or Deep.

Below that is a list of options providing even more precise blending for the perfectionist in you.

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