Practically all users of Photoshop and other image editing software will be aware of Layers and Blend Modes, and how useful they can be. Some of the most useful blend modes from a photographic point of view are screen, multiply, soft light, overlay, luminosity and hard light. The problem with blend modes is that you have to add a second layer into the mix for them to work – even if you unlock your b/ground layer blend modes are not available to you. So we’re stuck with large file sizes from duplicating layers, slow performance and the chance of a computer crash ….. or are we :-)
I do some image restoration and I can tell you that more often than not, the files can start to get rather large if there is a lot of work that needs to be done. Enter Katrin Eismann, a photoshop guru and one of the most well known people in image restoration. She has a little trick that I’m going to show you here that will keep your file sizes within a manageable range, whilst applying all the blend modes that you want. My start image is a 800×600 72dpi file, which you will recognise from the creating rain tutorial. What I want you to notice in the image below, is that after applying 6 adjustment layers my file size has only doubled.
So lets get started. Open your image, duplicate the image and close the original. Or use THIS What I want you to do now is go to the bottom of the layers palette and click on the adjustment layer icon and select a curves adjustment layer and when the dialogue box opens click ok without making any adjustments. Go to the top of the layers palette and change the blend mode to screen. You will notice that the image has lightened, but we are only looking for the foreground to be lighter in this case. Make sure the layer mask is selected and choose your gradient tool. With your f/ground, b/ground set to the default black and white, go to the gradient picker in the top menu bar and select black to transparent. Bearing in mind that black will conceal, I want you to start at the top of the image, hold down your left mouse button, drag down to the bottom hold down your shift key if you want a straight line, then release. The sky should have stayed the same as the original, and the f/ground will now be lighter.
Go to the adjustment layer icon again and pick a levels adjustment layer this time. When the dialogue opens click ok and change the blend mode of the layer to multiply. Do exactly the same as you did above except reverse the starting point for your gradient because we want to keep the dark sky. See image below for the effect so far. You’ll notice that it didn’t make any difference whether we used a curves or levels adjustment layer because we didn’t make any changes.
I’ve gone on and used 2 more adjustment layers with this image, both with the blend mode changed to screen, both with inverted masks – ctrl i on the keyboard to invert the mask (f/ground colour to white, select brush tool), and then I’ve painted back in over the trees on the first mask, and the foreground on the second mask. You can see in the image below that the revealed part of the mask is white i.e the part I wanted to stay lighter.
Start Image first, adjusted image second.
Remember that you can take down the opacity of any of the adjustment layers if you feel the effect is too strong.
