Fudgegraphics | for lovers » tip

Visual Guide to Layer Blending Modes in Photoshop

Franz Jeitz — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 20:36:37 +0000

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.

Mac Tip: Reverse Screen Colours

Franz Jeitz — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 18:36:39 +0000

At first I though it was just a little fun thing they added to Mac OSX, but today I discovered that it actually feeds a purpose. I was reading an interview on a dark website and half way through my eyes started to hurt. So I used the shortcut to reverse my screen colours which allowed me to read black text on a white background which really helped getting through it. Below are screenshots of what it looks like. I used this site as an example.

To access this shortcut press: ctrl+alt+apple+8
Hit it again to reverse to the original display.

Mac Tip: Master the Screencap Function

Franz Jeitz — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:14:31 +0000

Every once in a while you need the screen capture function, maybe it’s because you can’t download an image from flickr but still want it in your library or you need to record your workflow for a tutorial. Whatever the reason, Mac OSX offers two simple shortcuts to grab a screenshot. The first one makes a simple fullscreen shot. Just use the combination “apple+shift+3“. It should save it as png on your desktop. At least those were my default settings. It even makes a nice shutter sound.

The second shortcut is what makes it interesting. Clicking “apple+shift+4” gives you a little crosshair which lets you draw a rectangle of the screen portion you want grab. It works exactly like the Marquee tool in Photoshop. Once you’ve started your selection you can release the keys (not the mouse click) and

hold ALT to draw from center
hold SHIFT to constrain height or width (depending on your next mouse movement)
hold SPACE to move the current selection

Once you’ve released the mouse you’ve got a perfectly cropped picture. This technique saved me already quite some time and we all know how precious time is in a designer’s life.

Tutorial: How to extract a colour scheme from a photograph

Franz Jeitz — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 17:14:16 +0000

Today I picked up on a neat little trick on how to extract a colour palette from a photograph. Imagine you stumble upon a gorgeous photo (or piece of digital art) which has this special colour scheme. You could use the eyedropper tool to extract each colour individually but there’s a slicker way of doing it. This tutorial teaches you how to convert a photo into a fully functional colour swatch palette using photoshop and illustrator.

this is the photograph I got from flickr with nice warm colours which I want to use in a vector design. The first step is to open it in Photoshop.

For CS3 users only: make a duplicate and convert the picture into a smart object. This way you can edit the mosaic effect without messing up the original photo.

Go to filters > Pixelate > Mosaic and vary the cell size until you’re happy with the result. In my case 113 did the job. This is it for the Photoshop part.

The next step is to import our mosaic grid into Illustrator. If you’ve got an Ai file (preferably with the same, or larger dimensions) open you can simply drag an drop the layer from Photoshop.

This is were the magic happens. Making sure you have the content selected hit “Live Trace”.

Choose the “Photo High Fidelity” Preset from the Live Trace options. The default setting of 64 for Max Colours should be enough. Change it if you used a smaller cell size for the Mosaic filter. Now hit Expand.

With the expanded mosaic still selected open the Swatches palette and from the option menu choose “Add Selected Colors”. That’s it. Now you’ve imported the colours from your intial photograph into the swatches gallery in Illustrator. Save it so you can use it for different projects.

Photoshop Tip: Delete Brush Shortcut

Franz Jeitz — Wed, 28 May 2008 12:25:06 +0000

By pure accident I found out how to quickly delete a Photoshop brush from the preset list. This comes in very handy when you’re trying to save a custom brush set and don’t want any superfluous brushes to be in your .abr file. There’s a tedious way, which means right-clicking on each brush and selecting delete. There’s the obvious one by clicking the thrash icon in the brush palette. Finally there’s a hidden, much simpler, quicker way: hold the Alt-Key while clicking on the brushes you don’t want. A little pair of scissors should appear which indicates that you’re about to remove that particular brush. So simply Alt-click through your brush palette to delete them one by one. That’ll save you precious seconds and we all know that time-saving is very important when designing. FYI I am running Photoshop CS3 on a Mac so I’m not sure how compatible this shortcut is with other versions. Unfortunaltely I couldn’t produce a screenshot of the technique. It should be fairly straightforward though.

*Update*: The shortcut works on Windows running Photoshop CS3. Thanks to Mr.Ju!-ce for the info.