Visual Guide to Layer Blending Modes in Photoshop

December 12, 2008 · Posted in tutorial

The most essential feature in Photoshop is the ability to work with layers. Mastering the blending modes is key for every designer/graphic artist. There are quite a few articles on the web explaining how the different blending modes work. That is all very nice and interesting, however they always only show one example. From experience I know that the blending modes depend very much on the images you use. Hence I decided to showcase the different blending modes in action using 3 different images as overlay. You’ll notice the differences.

Self-Blending:

The first series shows the effect of the blending modes when you use it on the same image as the background. All you have to do is duplicate the background layer and change the modes of the top layer image. Here’s the results. You can click on the images to view them in original size.

Solid Color Blending:

These effects are achieved when stacking a solid color layer on top of a background image and changing the blending modes. In this case the difference are quite sublte for most modes from the same “family”.

Gradient Clouds Blending:

For this last example I used a colorful clouds image to blend. The different colors and brightness/darkness variations allow us to see what the different blending modes are really about.

Final Words:

Use this article as reference or sort of like a Photoshop Cheat Sheet. I encourage you to discover the power of blending modes by yourself. Take two images and blend them together. Vary the layer opacities and try different blending modes on top of each other. The possibilities are endless.

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Comments

17 Responses to “Visual Guide to Layer Blending Modes in Photoshop”

Clarissa on December 12th, 2008 11:08 pm

Ooo lets have a mixed bag of these! Like self overlay+gaussian blur!
Online Printing on December 23rd, 2008 11:10 pm

Useful post thanks, keep em coming! =-)
Tom Ross on January 22nd, 2009 4:54 am

Good idea to demonstrate the variety of blending modes on offer, but I have to admit most of these look horrible. I find myself only using a few of the available blending modes for this very reason, and most of the time only using them when the blend-mode image is the same as the original. That being said, they’re definitely a powerful feature of Photoshop.

Nice article

Tom Ross´s last blog post..PSDFAN (or rather I am) on Twitter
fudgegraphics on January 27th, 2009 4:39 pm

@Tom:

You’re right, most of these don’t look good at all. I usually only use Multiply, Overlay and Soft Light for most of my works.
Joe on May 13th, 2009 11:12 am

Agree that most of these will hardly be used at all, but still, you never know what you might need! Thanks for the post =)