- [Instructor] In this movie,
I'll introduce you to the blend modes.
Now, most folks get opacity pretty quickly.
It's pretty darn easy, after all.
They tend to have a harder time with blend modes.
But blend modes are just another method
for reducing the translucency of the selected object,
and thereby mixing it with the colors of the objects below.
But instead of using very simple math,
the way that opacity does,
they use slightly more complicated formulas.
Now, it's not the least bit important that you understand
what those formulas are, just important you understand
the basics of how blend modes work.
And so I'm going to start off by clicking on
this woman's head here, in order to select that mast image.
And I'm going to hide the selection edges,
just cause they're ultimately going to get in our way,
by pressing CTRL + H, or Command + H on the Mac.
Now there's a couple of different ways
to get to blend modes.
One is, you've got this pop-up menu,
here in the Transparency Panel,
even when it's collapsed, as we're seeing here.
And notice that the blend modes start off with Normal.
Normal is actually no blend mode.
It turns the blend mode off.
And then we've got a bunch of blend modes
starting with Darken and ending Luminosity.
Every one of them does something different.
That doesn't mean that they're all uniformly good.
It just means that each one is unique.
The other way to work is to go up to the Opacity option,
if you see it up here in the Control Panel,
it does shift around quite a bit.
And if you click on it, you'll bring up that pop-up panel,
and then you can click on the word Normal up here as well.
That's how I'm going to work, throughout this movie,
just because that way the blend mode menu is out of the way.
Now, notice how the blend modes
are organized into five groups.
Starting with these three right here,
so Darken, Multiply and Color Burn.
Those are the darkening modes, as we'll see.
Then we have Lighten, Screen and Color Dodge.
Those are the lightening modes.
They're all opposites of the first three.
Then we have Overlay, Soft Light and Hard Light.
They basically combine darkening and lightening
to create an enhanced contrast effect.
Then we have Difference and Exclusion.
They're the inversion modes.
We'll see what that means.
And then we have Hue, Saturation, Color and Luminosity.
They take advantage of the various HSL properties.
Alright, so we're going to start off with Darken.
Darken is going to use the selected object, in this case,
our placed image to darken everything behind it.
And it's going to do so absolutely.
So, in other words, if part of the selected object
is darker than it's background, we see it.
If not, we don't.
We end up seeing the background instead.
Which is why all the bright stuff in her face
is turning transparent, so that we can see
through to the purple gradient.
And, so, notice that we keep all the blacks,
but we lose white.
White absolutely disappears, and the other colors disappear
depending on their brightness, with the brighter colors
being more likely to disappear entirely.
If you want to amp up the effect,
that is create a higher contrast effect,
then you can drop down to Color Burn.
Notice that that increases the saturation values.
It also results in some weird abhorrent colors.
Her formerly green eyes have turned blue.
And the shadow detail is turning absolutely black.
A lot of that has to do with
the darkness of the background, incidentally.
But notice that we're getting a very sharp effect.
So, both Darken and Color Burn are sharp effects.
If you want something that's smoother,
and by the way, almost always better,
then you want Multiply, which is the good darkening mode.
And notice that we get some very,
very smooth transitions here.
But we are using the image to absolutely darken
the gradient in the background.
And we are losing all of the whites,
whites entirely disappear,
and everything else uniformly darkens.
And so, the analogy is that you take the selected image or
object, and you print it on a piece of transparent acetate.
And then you print everything else on another transparency,
and you put them on top of each other on a light table,
and this is the effect that you get.
So, the light has to go through both images before
it reaches your eyes, which is why everything darkens.
It's a great shadow effect.
So, basically the moral of the story is
Darken and Color Burn, never going to use them.
You can completely forget about them if you want to.
Multiply, you're going to end up using on a regular basis.
Alright, now let's drop down to the Screen modes
and it works just the same way.
So, Lighten creates this really choppy effect.
Notice that the blacks entirely disappear,
so we have this kind of floating head effect,
because her head is mounted on a black collar as well.
But we're either keeping colors or not.
So, if they're brighter in the face, then they're visible.
If they're not brighter, then they drop away
and we see the background instead.
So, again, we get harsh transitions,
Lighten is the opposite of Darken.
If you want to amp up the effect, you switch to Color Dodge,
which, as you might guess, is the opposite of Color Burn.
And so I'll go ahead and choose it,
and notice we get these blown highlights,
that is to say large areas turn absolutely white.
And then the shadows end up giving us
these very saturated abhorrent colors.
So, the oranges are now turning hot pink.
Again, you're rarely going to use either of these modes.
The one that you will use, very likely on a frequent basis,
is Screen, which is going to give you these nice smooth, soft
transitions, and it creates something analogous to
the big Wizard of Oz head in the original movie.
And it looks absolutely great.
Now, we are once again dropping out the blacks,
as with any of those Lighten modes.
But we're getting great, smooth transitions,
and we're not blowing any highlights.
So, even though these two modes names are
quite different from each other,
they are opposites in terms of their effect.
Now, Screen doesn't actually divide or anything like that,
and it's really not important that
you understand the math behind it.
But it's analogous to taking two images in different slide
projectors, so the face in one slide projector and the
gradient in another, and shining them onto the same screen,
so that everything uniformly brightens.
Moral of the story, forget about Lighten and Color Dodge,
remember that the lightening mode you want
on a regular basis is Screen.
Alright, that takes care of the first six blend modes,
including the two most important ones of all,
Multiply and Screen.
We'll take a look at the remaining blend modes
in the next movie.