Still playing with blend modes in Photoshop

I seem to have started something for myself with the book I mentioned in a post back in March. When I take a digital photo now, the first thing I do before I use it, is to just see if a better image can be "developed" by using blend modes rather than simply individual tools like brightness and contrast and opacity levels.

The book I found in a charity shop, inspired me to start playing around with the blend modes but it is rather like a cookery book. The author himself actually calls the examples recipes, and gives settings to explain the results on the photos which he shows. Great for showing what you can do - not so great for explaining what you do to achieve a required effect. I started looking around on the internet using Google and lo and behold, as you might expect, there are lots of great tutorials. Some are just a little too technical with lots of maths, but bookmarking one or two is well worth while for reference. I would recommend

Photoshop blend modes explained to understand how  they work  

Photoshop’s Five Essential Blend Modes For Photo Editing, a brilliant article explaining how to use the blend modes to achieve a desired effect

Photoshop, using blend modes  - a little more complicated usage but well explained.


I am sure that a quick search will bring up many more, of which, you may find your own favourites. There is a mixture of ( fairly complicated maths), what they are, what they do and how to use them in all of the articles and your own requirements will colour your choice. But for now, take a look at how I improved this simple macro-photograph of an amaryllis flower.

Quite a decent shot but I prefer a little more contast in my images, a personal choice. So I looked at the blend modes which serve to increase the contast. After switching through those half dozen modes, I decided to go with "OVERLAY" which gave me the results as follows:

I thought this bought out the scarlet of the petals whilst darkening the centre of the trumpet. If I was looking for a botanical image then the first is going to be best because more detail is seen in the shaded centre of the bloom. But this was to be purely for effect, so I went for it.

I also edited the shot to reduce the information in the background here. I selected the flower using the magic wand tool, setting a high tolerance and adding small areas by shift +clicking until the whole area was selected. I then inverted the selection and used image/adjustments/hue&saturation to give the effect which I was after.

But the flower then seemed to be floating rather then existing in the scene, a last touch was to copy the stem and paste into this image.

A small touch but it worked for me.

Have You Discovered The Usefulness of Blend Modes On Photoshop?

I guess most old hands on Photoshop will know all about Blend Modes. But I have used it for a couple of years and never really touched these useful  tools. I would not class myself as an expert but I thought I could do most things I needed with other tools.

Today however I finally found a book which explains what they do and how to use them. I have been playing with these for a while since returning home and thought I would post a few of the results. I have yet to really get to know them but at least I have an idea of what they will do - or at least some of them. I will be working on getting a better understanding and maybe pass some of my learning on in this blog.

So lets take a simple photograph of Kennilworth Castle, it leaves a lot to be desired; quite flat and little contrast / colour even though the day was reasonably sunny.

Now after copying the background to provide a second layer (drag background to the new layer icon) select the blend mode for the new layer and choose overlay.

The result is a much more lively image.

Now this could be have been achieved by using the IMAGE/ADJUST/ ... menu and going through the brightness/contrast and maybe compensating for colour; but it will take much longer.

Now without giving any details, here are a few effects (I will give the blend mode of the copied layer. All were done in a similar manner. Again, there are many ways of achieving the same thing in PS; use whichever works for you but I know I have found these to be very useful.

Here I used vivid light mode, the shadows are rather deep but good for effect.

Exlusion mode was used here, although other edits were made to the image as well.

This was a combination of effects, so I am not going to name just one of them.


I have enjoyed playing with these effects, and as I said may post some other results of my plaaying around with them. Definitely adds another string to the photographers bow.

Oh, for the record, the book I am referring to is PHOTOSHOP Blending Modes Cookery Book by John Beardsworth published by ILEX Digital Studio. I have no affiliate connections with the author or publisher.

More Photoshop Fun

Following on from the last post, I was still playing around with the same image in Photoshop and using various filters just to see what I could achieve. I really must make a note of what I am doing so that when something works, something turns up which I like, I can do it again. I could even let you know what I did. But unforrtunately for this piece, I only remember working with blend modes. One of the actions gave this shimmering effect to the tops of the tree branches.

I will be trying to repeat this so I hope that I will be able to return and let you in on the process; or maybe you know and could leave me a comment. I would be very grateful. There are only two layers, thte original photo and a layer of blue for the sky, which was a new layer and painted in using the paaint bucket tool). And then blended, so I should be aable to sus out what I did.

But just for now this is the edited image (see the previous post for the original):-

I have also been creating "miniworlds" using the filter, distort/polar cordinates. Saw this on a blog by a fellow Redgage user (lensbaby) and got caught up with the idea.

This was a photo of a group of trees on Cleeve Hill

And this was taken in Lanzarote, the white buildings are the hotel we stayed in

Find more examples on Redgage

Colourising and Blending Layers in Photoshop

Blending layers is one area wher I have not had much success in understanding what can be done, however I took some more photographs of the weather which has hit us this week. Very cold and trees covered in hoar frost.

This gave an opportunity for a few shots along the local canal, here is one from a road bridge looking straight down the canal.

There was not a lot ofcolour in the shot because of thet light conditions, especially in the sky. So I thought that it was a good image to plat around with. My first thought was to desaturate to turn it into a B&W image, a little mod to the contrast and brightness gave:

Not much of an improvement really, so what would happen if I tried to increase the colour, or even alter the hues:

Looking even better, but that sky is impervious to anything; there just isn't anything there to work with. I then added a new layer which I flooded with a "sky" blue colour. I pulled the transparency back to approx 50% and it gave a very acceptable sky. BUT the rest of the picture was hidden behind a semi-transparent blue layer, altering the colour, creating a lack of contrast and even looking out of focus thru the new layer.

What to do? Well I knew that laters could be blended but had never really tried out the combinations. Time to play! I hit first time on the multiplcation setting ( it was at the top of a drop down list) and it seemed to cause the new layer to vanish or become invisible over all existing pixels. Voila, a blue sky added to an unchanged image. Sheer luck, but now I have a reason to learn the why's and wherefores of blending options. Here is a composite of the four "final Images":

The first is the desaturated image, the next three are the original, and two with edited hues plus the top layer (50% transparency) and blend method set to multiply.

I still have much to learn about this great tool!

If you want to see more images from this cold spell, browse over to Redgage, I am using this site more and more because it pays for visits to your content. The amount depends upon how active you are and how much you promote your content on the site. Why not start your own account? It may not make you rich in a hurry but remember the tortoise and the hare.

More trials with Photoshop

This time I have been experimenting with a few edits which will allow me to improve on my poor photographic skills - and my impatience when taking photographs.

This image is of the house at Lites - Carey Manor near Yeovil. Not a very sunny day - note the sky! What sky you might say? Well it is there but grey cloud covering the whole sky. We did get some good weather on this trip, so the first task was to find a photo with a decent blue sky with some interesting clouds if possible.

This shot of Glaston bury the following day looked very promising... So now I have a photo without a sky, and a photo of a sky. Will they match?

The following steps were taken to put the two together:-

1. Select the sky in the first image with the magic wand (a single click since all the sky is the same colour). Now from the select menu choose INVERT.
2. Copy the image except the sky and paste into a new image.
3. Select a rectangle from the sky in the second image; copy this selection and paste as a new layer into the new image from the last step.
4. Select the new layer and then choose from the edit menu, TRANSFORM. Select SCALE
5. Expand the sky image until it fits behind the buildings without the background showing.
6. I was not finished yet.
7. First of all, for good measure, I flipped the image horizontally (Image/Rotate Image)
8. I then wanted to make sure the chimney was vertical. So I rotated the image in one or two steps to achieve this.
9. Now the roofline of the adjoining chapel was wrong.
10. I selected the whole of the chapel with the magnetic lassoo tool. Again, using the transform function I rotated the chapel to achieve a horizonta roofline.
11. This left gaps with the background showing thru around the chapel. These were filled in with the clone stamp tool.

And the resulting image:-

Mmmm, I may have overcompensated for the angle of the chimney, but otherwise I have learnt a few tips and the image is considerably better. Don't you think?

Removing unwanted artefacts in a photo, using Photoshop

Ever taken a photograph and decide it was a real winner; before noticing that small object which you hadn't seen in the camea's screen (we'er talking digital obviously) before pressing the button. I know I have many with which I wanted to illustrate articles, etc.

What is wrong with these:-

Answer:- The people just coming into view through the entry

Answer:- The visa card advert.

Answer:- The power lines running across the tower.

Answer:- The small lamp in the lower left corner.

Answer:- The wheelbarrow, how could I have missed it?

There were even gardeners working there at the time.

Most of these issues I solved using the CLONE STAMP TOOL in Photoshop. A very useful editing tool if used carefully. I have recently written a tutorial on Squidoo, which shows how I used this to clean up the examples shown above. You can find it at:-

Simple Editing To Remove Unwanted Objects From Your Photographs.

You can also see the results of the editing process, a set of much better and more appropriate photographs which I can feel proud of. The only one that I didn't edit by this method was the first. There was no background to speak of that I could have cloned to remove the figures. In that case I selected the open at the end of the entry and deletd it. I then added a second layer beneath the original photograph and adjusted its position to give a pleasing result. I had to carefully select a suitable street shot and re-size it to look natural in the edited photograph. But no problems really. I will include a link to this edit, asap.