GUIDE: Using Blend Modes in Photoshop - Nigel French
There is a dropdown at the top of the Photoshop Layers panel that most of us have clicked through and given up on. Normal, Dissolve, Darken, Multiply, Colour Burn, and on it goes. Twenty-seven of them, and almost nobody is ever taught what they actually do.
This is the guide that fixes that and it is one of the most thorough things anyone has written for us!
Nigel French put it together to go alongside his blend modes evening, and it does two jobs. The first half is a proper reference: every single blend mode, grouped into families, each one explained in a couple of plain sentences. What it does to the pixels, what colour is neutral, and when you would reach for it. The second half is the fun part, where he takes one mode at a time and builds something real with it.
What is inside
A full reference to all twenty-seven modes, sorted into darkening, lightening, contrast, comparison and colour families, plus the ones that only show up with particular tools. Once you can see the families, you stop hunting through the list.
Worked projects, with before and after images and the Layers panel shown for each one:
- A swan and a river turned into a double exposure, and black line art coloured in underneath
- Handwriting lifted off its paper and laid over a poppy, with the paper edge cleaned away
- A dandelion pulled off its dark background, a lens flare added to a sunset, and fireworks put behind a city skyline
- Dodging and burning a misty Yosemite scene on a single grey layer you can throw away
- A street scene stacked into something impressionistic, a starling murmuration given more body, and the Orton glow done two ways
- Two portraits lined up using Difference, which is the trick nobody expects
- St Paul's Cathedral turned into a pencil drawing
- A Victorian photograph of a child hand-coloured, by brush and with Neural Filters
- A new sky dropped into a Flatiron Building shot using Blend If
- Type knocked clean through a landscape
The parts most people never reach: Blend If, Knockout, how Fill differs from Opacity, why a group set to Pass Through behaves differently from one set to Normal, and what to check when something unexpected happens.
A one-page recap at the end, organised by the job you are trying to do rather than by mode name. For paper and dark marks, try this. For light against darkness, try that. It is the page you will come back to.
Who it is for
Anyone using Photoshop who has never properly understood that menu, and anyone who uses three or four modes out of habit and cannot always predict the result. It assumes no prior knowledge of blend modes and does not leave you there.
From Mark
I asked Nigel for a handout and he sent back something closer to a small book. Twenty-two pages, written and illustrated properly, with his own photographs throughout.
What I like about it is that it is two things at once. You can read it start to finish and come away understanding the whole menu, or you can keep it on the desktop and look up Colour Burn in ten seconds when you need to. Blend modes are exactly the sort of subject you look up rather than memorise, and until now there has not been anywhere good to look.
About Nigel
Nigel French is a graphic designer, photographer and design teacher based in Lewes, in East Sussex. He has recorded more than fifty courses for LinkedIn Learning and speaks regularly at Adobe MAX, CreativePro and the Photoshop Virtual Summit. His books include InDesign Type and the Photoshop Visual QuickStart Guide.
