Photoshop Blending Modes Explained – Day 18

Blending Modes, Explained.

The blending mode dropdown is a wall of names — Dissolve, Color Burn, Vivid Light, Pin Light, Hard Mix — and nobody memorizes it. They do not need to.

Look at the thin dividing lines in the list. There are six groups, each doing one job, and within each group you will realistically use the first one or two. That reduces twenty-seven options to about six worth knowing.

Six Groups, Not Twenty-Seven Modes

Normal

Normal and Dissolve. Normal is the default and Dissolve is almost never used.

Darken

Darken, Multiply, Color Burn, Linear Burn, Darker Color. Everything here darkens: the dark pixels of your layer survive and the light ones drop away. Multiply is the one you will reach for.

Lighten

Lighten, Screen, Color Dodge, Linear Dodge, Lighter Color. The exact opposite — light pixels survive, dark ones disappear. Screen is the workhorse.

Contrast

Overlay, Soft Light, Hard Light and the rest. These combine light, dark and color at once, darkening what is dark and lightening what is light. Mostly used for color and tone work. Soft Light and Overlay are the two.

Comparative

Difference, Exclusion, Subtract, Divide. Genuinely useful for aligning layers and for special effects, and rarely used in ordinary photo editing.

Color

Hue, Saturation, Color, Luminosity. Each takes one property from your layer and leaves the rest of the image alone — Color takes the color and keeps the underlying brightness, Luminosity does the reverse.

Cycle Through Them From the Keyboard

Press V for the Move tool first — this matters, because with a brush selected the same shortcut changes the brush’s blending mode instead. Then hold Shift and press + or – to step through the list, watching the canvas.

This is how to work when you are not sure. You do not need to know which mode is right; you need to recognize the right result when it appears.

Multiply: Put a Photograph Into a Frame

Dark subject on a light background is the classic Multiply case — and it does the job with no mask at all.

1. Drag the Artwork In and Set It to Multiply

   The light background disappears, the dark subject stays. Position and scale it over the frame.

2. Notice What Multiply Does to Shadows

   Because it darkens rather than replaces, any shadow already in the frame shows through and combines with the artwork. That is a shadow you did not have to fake.

The Levels Trick That Makes It Clean

Multiply only hides pure white. A scanned or photographed background is never pure white — it is faintly warm or gray, and that faint tone stays visible as a rectangle.

The fix takes five seconds. With the layer selected press Ctrl/Cmd + L for Levels, take the white point eyedropper, and click on the background. It becomes genuinely white, and Multiply makes it genuinely invisible.

Do the same in reverse for the Lighten group: use the black point eyedropper on a nearly-black background so Screen can drop it completely. If the layer is a Smart Object — which it is by default when you drag a file in — the Levels adjustment stays editable afterwards.

Screen: Light Leaks, Flares and Bokeh

1. Find an Effect on a Black Background

   Light leaks, lens flares, bokeh, sparks, smoke — anything bright on near-black. This is why stock effects are shot that way.

2. Set It to Screen and Clean the Blacks With Levels

   Screen keeps the light and drops the dark. Then Ctrl/Cmd + L and the black point eyedropper on the background to remove the faint rectangle edge.

3. Duplicate and Flip It

   Ctrl/Cmd + J, then Ctrl/Cmd + T and flip horizontally or vertically. One light leak becomes several, coming from different directions, without looking repeated.

4. Recolor It if the Hue Is Wrong

   Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation and move the hue slider. A blue light leak becomes a warm one in one drag — you are never stuck with the color the stock file came in.

Soft Light: Borrow the Color of Another Photograph

This is the most interesting idea in the day. Take any photograph whose color and light you like, blur it beyond recognition, and use it to grade a completely different image.

1. Place the Color Reference on Top

   Any image with color you want — the subject does not matter, because it will not be recognizable.

2. Set It to Soft Light or Overlay

   At this point the reference image is still legible on top of yours, which is not the goal.

3. Blur It Heavily

   Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur with a large radius. All that survives is broad areas of color and light. As a Smart Object the radius stays adjustable.

4. Scale and Position the Color

   Ctrl/Cmd + T and move the blurred layer around, watching what it does. You are effectively painting light across your image — put the bright part where you want attention drawn, usually your subject.

5. Adjust It With Levels and Hue/Saturation

   Levels to control how strongly it reads, Hue/Saturation if the color is close but not right. Lower the layer opacity if the whole thing is too much.

Stack two of these — one for color, one for light — and you have a grade that no preset would produce, built from photographs you already liked.

Finish With a Gradient Map

After several colored layers, an image can feel like separate pieces. A Gradient Map at the top, opacity pulled down to 10–20%, maps a single gradient across the whole tonal range and pulls everything into one palette.

If it looks inverted, click Reverse. Then cycle through the presets with the opacity already low; several will look good and one will look right.

Play With Them

Download the sample images and build all three examples. The habit worth taking away is the levels-plus-blend-mode pairing: whenever a blend mode nearly works and leaves a faint edge, the answer is almost always an eyedropper on the black or white point rather than a mask.

Day 17 covered Blend If, which controls the same kind of blending by tonal range instead. Tomorrow, Day 19 continues the series.