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Filter & Blending Modes Tips

Lesson 10 from: Creating Different Photoshop Filter Looks

Ben Willmore

Filter & Blending Modes Tips

Lesson 10 from: Creating Different Photoshop Filter Looks

Ben Willmore

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Lesson Info

10. Filter & Blending Modes Tips

Lesson Info

Filter & Blending Modes Tips

So far, the main blending mode we've been using is the stuff in the category that starts with overlay soft, light hardline. What's unique about those that I really like is that 50% gray goes away and a lot of filters that you apply the one called High Pass. The majority of what you get is 50% gray. Also, whenever you apply the in boss filter, which we use near the beginning of the day, the majority of your image will be 50% gray. So it really aligns with those when I made those Grady INTs liquid for the drill hole. Well, when you're going from black to white, what's halfway in between 50% gray, it will make part of it disappear. But there are others, and I just want to give you a general idea of some of them in case they help you when you're working with filters. So in this case, let's apply a filter, and this time I'll do it like, ah, lot of people want to, which is smart filters. It seems like the trend these days is nondestructive imaging, and I'm all for it. But what I'm not for is...

making it get in the way of teaching. You know, if you if you're trying to get fancy and make it nondestructive, that's great. But sometimes it's like a little less understandable. That's why I haven't been doing it every single time in this case. I'll do that as a smart filter. And this time I'm gonna run a filter that is called if I could find it. Style eyes find edges with find edges. You might notice that a lot of my end result is white. Just a large area of white in there isn't her. And then it found the edges of objects and it put black lines around them. Well, I'm gonna go now to my layers panel in just to the right of where it says find edges. I see this, like on right here in all that icon does is it will act as if I was working on a duplicate layer when I applied the filter. And if I was working on a duplicate layer sitting above the original, wouldn't I have right up here the blending mode in the opacity? Well, I didn't work on a duplicate. Instead, I turned this into a smart object. I applied that filter called find edges. And now, to get those same two choices for this, I double click right there. So so far, we've mainly used blending modes there in this category where 50% gray goes away. Now, let me show you what's special about some of the other categories that are in here. Do you notice up here that these blending modes of group together where there is a horizontal line just above them and there's a horizontal line just below that grouping? The reason why all of these air group together is the only thing they're capable of doing is darkening your picture. And one unique quality of all of those is with all of them, white disappears. So if you ever apply a filter and you notice that a large portion of your end result contains white, then this might be the go to section to go to so I can come in here and try darken in here, multiply mode, acts like ink. Imagine you're going to print the end result, which looked like this, remember? And you were gonna print it on top of the original picture as if you have the original picture. You printed it on an inkjet printer. It came out and you're gonna put that sheet of paper back through the inkjet printer for a second pass. And on the second pass, you're gonna print that. That's what multiply mode does, and so it's gonna look very similar. But it could be nice if you use if you have a very graphic looking images that has very defined areas between one color or area and the next is you can use, find edges and then using multiply mode makes all of those white areas disappear. The opposite of this would be a section of blending modes where, instead of only being able to darken, they'd only be able to brighten things in those air found just below it. The reason all these group together is the only thing they're capable of doing is brightening your picture, and with those solid black would disappear. So if you ever get a filter that delivers an awful lot of solid black and it's just way too much, these might be the go to blending modes to get them to blend them with the original picture. And so that gives you kind of three different sections in here. If the blending modes can give you an idea of when you might decide, Teoh head towards them. If you want to know more about blending modes, I've done entire classes on just those kind of subjects. So look at the back catalogue. I probably have how many classes. So I have, like, 30 40. I don't know eso there's anything you want to learn about. Just look at some of those. So if you want to get an idea of when you might want to try some of those other blending Moz, let's look at using some of the things we've already done and combining them with one of those blending modes so you can see how something simple can turn into something better by just knowing a little bit more about photo shop in different areas. So here gives. Here's why. Karen, going into a happy uh in this is ah, crepe place. I think in Portland I'm gonna create a brand new empty layer above that, and I'm going to try to apply some noise. But remember what happens when I try noise on an empty layer, then work well in this image, what I want to do is I want to add what looks like some snow. So I'm gonna come in here snow or rain. I'm going to fill this layer because we need to have something in their 50%. Gray would be fine, and then we're going to apply noise, a lot of noise. Then I'm going to distort this noise, just like we before. You remember how he did motion Blur. But we're just going to do it at an angle. We might want it to be snowing, and we're gonna do it a lot less than before. So it looks a little bit more random, little less polished like that. And then if we have a blending mode that makes black disappear If Black disappeared, what would we have left the light stuff One way. So the blending mode that makes black disappear would be all the ones that are in here. The things that can only Brighton. I'll use the one called screen mode. Well, that looks like a pretty big rainstorm. So let's see if we can get rid of some of what's there. I'm going to simply adjust what we have to make Mawr areas black. Here I'm using levels. This slaughter forces areas to black, and if they get more and more areas toe, look black. We get less and less areas showing up, but it's too consistent. I wanted to be less consistent. Well, how can we make something a little less consistent? Let's add a layer mask in a layer mask. I don't feel like painting to make this less consistent. So why don't we use one of the other filters that we had tried before? Didn't we have something called clouds that looked nothing like clouds? It was just random brightened dark stuff. Well, if you put that in a mask, dark things make things disappear. Light things make them show up. So if I do clouds in the mask, I'll show you what's in the masked by option clicking on it. That's what's in my mask. Wherever you see black, it will prevent this stuff from showing up. Wherever you see white, it will show up, so now it looks a little bit more randomized. If I turn off this mask, which you can do so by holding shift in clicking, you can see before I had the mask and after. It's not that I wanted to show you how to make this exact effect. It's that I wanted to just get you more comfortable with the basic ideas of filters that can create something out of nothing in that they don't have to be used just for putting a texture on top of your image. It could be that we did that soft look on an image or the look where it gave it an antique color, and you don't want to apply everywhere you want it to be kind of a modeled look. We'll add a mask and use one of the filters that create something out of nothing, and suddenly you can have something like that.

Ratings and Reviews

lynny
 

Wow! Very impressed with Ben's course. I've played with filters for a long time, but I still learned a lot. I'm very glad I stopped in for this refresher, and I plan to buy it so I can be inspired by his creative uses of filters.

Carolyn Whiteside
 

Amazing presentation; organized; clear explanation of issues; easily understood; helpful!!

Lina
 

Good for beginners :-)

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