Blending Modes in Photoshop

Photoshop Blend modes is a way to blend pixels of two images with each other to get different types of effects.

How to blend in photoshop & how its work into the layer panel

There are so many reasons for blend modes to be popular among the designers. you can correct the photos,you can convert a lighter image to darker or darker image to lighter, or you can create several types of effects by using particular blend modes for particular images.

Here I have a ruff texture image for my background. I will gona use another image and blend it with this background.

Here is the blend mode menu at the top of the layer panel and by default it is always on normal mode.

Look there are various types of photoshop blending modes grouped in various categories in the list. You can choose anyone of them and create a different effect everytime.

Let me take another image to blend with the background texture.

So here are two different layers. To apply blending mode you need to select the layer and open the blend mode list and choose anyone of them. THE BLENDING MODES ARE SEPARATED INTO SIX GROUPS

Blending Modes Groups

In blending mode list each group of blend mode have certain functions.

Such like the first section here darkens the image. it affects on the overall darkness of the image.

The second group affects overall brightness of the image. it allows lighter areas to show through and makes darker areas drop back.

The next group affects the lightness and darkness both. I choose overlay here.

The next group creates inverted effects.

And the last group in the list deals with the colors of image.

You can also change blend modes sequentially by pressing up and down arrow keys.

I think “Multiply” is better option for this image. It gives striking look to this image.

We can also get blending modes in “layerstyle panel”.

For that let me draw a new shape. then give some layerstyle to it so that we can check blending modes there in “layer style panel”.

Let me check on “outer glow” and set its parameters.

Now you can see on top, the same list of blend modes over here, which was in blend mode menu out there in “layer panel”.

You can choose any blend mode you want.

One more thing is you can play with “opacity of layer” when using blend modes to get better result.

See I’m using color burn mode. i liked this blending in photshop effect but it has over brightened the image. so I can drag down the opacity of the background layer to set the image proper. now you can see the difference.

Now i hope, you got the basic idea of how powerful feature the “blend mode” is.