Photoshop’s best Blend Modes for photographers

When it comes to digital photography and combining or enhancing images, there are two essential components – your layers and the Blend Mode you choose to work with. In this post we’ll look at some of the ways you can blend your layers together, and then we’ll list the 10 best Blend Modes you can use to enhance your photos

Essentially, a Blend Mode is based on complicated mathematics performed by Photoshop, in which the software calculates the differences or similarities between image information on the target layer (Blend) and the one below it (Base). Then, depending on the chosen type of Blend Mode, it blends these two layers in a particular way.

As you’ll see further on in this post, there are many flavours of Blend Modes, useful for distinctly different image-editing scenarios. Some modes use the tones and colours from one layer to darken the other, while different modes do the exact opposite.

There are some Blending Modes that will have a striking effect on contrast, while there are others that affect only colour information.

On the next page we’ll look at how you can use these various Blending Modes to their best advantage. We’ll show you what each one does, and how they can be used to great effect in your digital photography workflow.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 11th, 2012 at 11:00 am and is filed under Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a comment. Pinging is currently not allowed.