Photo 11

Sue Leith

Blend Modes Exercise

Open: boat at sunset

The purpose of this exercise is to see how the use of different blend modes can improve the color and tone of your images, making a regular photograph into a custom color print. Your goal is to try to match your image to the end image on the overhead.

Instructions on how to do this exercise are on the back but, as usual; try to do it yourself before looking.

1. Increase the dynamic range of this image. Do not damage the image in any way.

2. Burn in the sky, the mountain and the dark (large bottom area) of water. Do not burn in the bright area of water above the boat.

3. Dodge the boat reflection at the top left and middle of the boat (see overhead for reference).

4. Gently saturate the entire image.

5. Darken the entire outside (border) of this image.

Save as Yourname.blendmode.psd and drop in drop box

How to do the Blend Modes Exercise

1. Do this with a levels adjustment layer. Careful – your numbers should be around 9 and 247 – farther than that either way and you will be clipping pixels.

2 Create a new, blank empty layer and name it “burn”. Change the blend mode of this layer from normal to Soft Light. (Blend modes are located in the top of the layers palette as a drop down menu.) Paint with a soft brush, set to black using 100% opacity in the Options Bar. It will look too dark. Go to Edit > Fade Brush Tool and move the slider left (decreasing the effect) until you like the way it looks.

If you’d like to reduce the effect more you may also lower the opacity of the entire layer. Hint: When painting you want to use a large enough size brush to easily cover your area without going too far outside of the edges – but if you do paint too large an area change to the regular eraser and just erase the excess.

3. Create a new, blank empty layer and name it “dodge”. Change the blend mode of this layer from normal to Soft Light. Paint with a soft brush, set to white and follow instructions above. Dodging works exactly the same as burning except you are painting with white instead of black.

4. Create a new, blank empty layer and name it “saturate””. Change the blend mode of this layer from normal to Saturation. Go to Edit > Fill and choose “color”. Then when the color picker pops up click on any color you want. Saturating works similar to dodging and burning but can be very strong. In the bottom of this dialog box (before you click OK) change the Opacity slider to around 10-15%. Click OK. If this effect is too much you can lower the opacity of the entire layer. You can also use the eraser to erase any areas you do not want saturated.

5. When labs do custom prints they often burn or darken the outer edges of a print to keep the viewers eye inside the image. To do this, use the rectangular marquee tool and select an area approximately ½ to 1 inch from the outside of the image (from corner to corner). Then go to Select > Inverse so only the outer inch or so is selected. Then feather your selection with a large pixel feather (I used 80 pixels). With your selection active click on the adjustment layer icon at the bottom of the layers palette and click on the Curves Adj. Layer. With just one point near the middle of the line, drag the curve to darken the selected area so it subtly darkens the outside edge of your image.