Today we’re talking about blend modes in Adobe Photoshop
and Premiere Pro, and how to use them to make your photos
and videos look cooler easily, that go beyond what you can do
by adjusting the regular sliders that you would see.
Let's get Undone.
[offbeat music]
♪ Gerald Undone ♪
♪ He’s crazy ♪
What's happening, Donk Squad? I’m Gerald Undone,
and today we’re gonna do a little something different.
I'm drawing a little inspiration
from a fabulous fellow
Canadian content creator, Peter McKinnon,
who does a thing called “Two-Minute Tuesdays” where
he kinda goes over some tips and tricks,
usually with Photoshop or Premiere Pro
or something like that, that you can do
to step up your filmmaking and-- I don’t know.
If you guys have ever seen any Peter McKinnon videos
you’ll know what I’m talking about. There’s a lot of things
that I do in Premiere Pro,
in Photoshop, in Lightroom, etc., and I got a lot of
comments: “hey, can you make one of these for me?”
“Hey, how’d you do that, how’d you do this effect?”
And a lot of people request that I do more
videos like this, so I figured why not, let’s do it.
And I figured I'd cover a couple things that I've been playing
around with a lot lately because I've been enjoying the effect.
So we’re talking about blend modes.
You know, these are the things like “Dissolve,”
and “Pin Light” and “Hard Mix,” and that kind of stuff.
So let’s just go over this a little bit as what
we’re talking about. So I just popped open a new document here.
You know, it’s just a big nothing...
there we go. It's this colour, OK?
Now let’s say that we have a second layer over here
of the same thing, but maybe this one has, I don't know,
green on it, and we wanted to blend these two things together.
When you drop down this box here next to “Opacity” that says
“Normal,” all the different blend modes appear.
Now, the cluster of blend modes that we're gonna talk about
today, because they’re the harder ones to
understand and they make the cool effects that I want to
talk about, are the ones in this section right here.
These are the “complex” ones, as Adobe calls them.
And they have “Overlay,” “Soft Light,” “Hard Light,”
“Vivid Light,” “Linear Light,” “Pin Light,” and “Hard Mix.”
We are gonna focus primarily on “Overlay,”
“Soft Light” and “Linear Light” today, because
they all make pretty cool effects that I want to show you.
And I'll just drop one down here so you can see. If you choose
“Overlay,” well, now the green from the top layer
was mixed in with the purple from the bottom layer
and you get this kind of dirty maroon colour.
Now, the real question is, how does it choose how to do that,
and how do I use that to make cool-looking stuff?
So what we’re gonna do is I’m gonna take the intro
to this video and I’m gonna open it up in Premiere Pro,
and I’m also gonna take a screen grab from that
and I’m gonna open it up in Photoshop.
So that way if you guys only do photos,
you can use the Photoshop one, if you only do video, you can do
Premiere Pro, if you wanna know how to do it on both,
you can do it both. So let's grab that intro now.
So a couple quick things you need to know: I use a PC,
so if I talk shortcuts or commands, they’re PC-related.
I think I know most of the Mac
ones, but if I don't and somebody in
the comments does and you want to do a translation on those,
you want to give me some corrections, I would love to
hear them, and I'm sure the viewers would as well.
But I also try to tell you them without using shortcuts as much.
So we have Premiere Pro open here now.
Now, this was me talking to you guys right here.
This is completely ungraded footage.
You know, I have presets that I've made
that I can drop on it to give
it sort of my signature look like that, but let’s leave it
ungraded for now so we can see what's going on.
So let's take a grab out of this footage here
so that we can use the same effect in Photoshop,
so we can show both at the same time.
If you don't know how to do that,
there's a little camera button here, if you don't have it,
you should hit the plus and then choose
to add the camera button to your toolbar.
But if you hit the camera button it’s to export one frame.
So we’re just gonna call this “Grabby,”
and that’s gonna go on my desktop.
There we go, we've got “Grabby” in Photoshop,
and we can close this weird purple thing that we made.
Perfect, so we’ve got it here, and we’ve also
got it in Premiere Pro.
So just to give you a quick idea
of what makes the complex
blend modes complex, and what
makes them different from the other ones.
Basically, they're complex blend
modes because they perform different
operations depending on whether
the colour is lighter than 50% gray.
So you’ll get kind of a split-tone effect,
which is what makes them more complex versus,
say, a regular effect, which will apply maybe evenly to
the entire image, regardless of how light or dark it is.
So the first one of the three that we're gonna talk about is
Overlay, and what Overlay does is it multiplies
only the colour channels that are lighter than 50% gray.
So what this is great for is
doubling up the intensity of your image while still
preserving the shadows and the highlights because of
the way that it selects from the underlying layer.
So this can create fantastic effects.
Now, what Soft Light does is it darkens or lightens
the colour channel, again, depending on the lightness of
the source of the underneath layer, which kind of gives
an effect of shining like a diffused spotlight on
the underneath layer, which, again, can be pretty awesome
for creating an effect in your photos and video.
And then the third and last one we’re gonna talk
about is Linear Light, and what Linear Light does
is it kind of splits it down to the 50% gray,
and if the source is greater than 50% gray, it lightens it;
if the source is darker than 50% gray, it darkens it,
and the brightness is increased and decreased at the same time.
So it kind of just sort of pushes things based
on the 50% gray divider.
Now, this one is a little bit trickier to use,
because if you just sort of go throwing it on at 100%,
it'll make everything really, really harsh, much worse
than just sliding your contrast
all the way up-- if this sounded like contrast
to you, because it kind of is similar to contrast.
But what’s great about all these effects that
I’m gonna show you is they create a look
that you can’t just create by
sliding your contrast or your brightness around.
They can be really useful if you're trying to
give a certain mood with your photos and videos.
So let’s jump right into the first one, which is probably
one of the most exaggerated effects, but also
one of the coolest, and I'm calling it the “dream effect.”
So what we’re gonna need to do for this one, we’ll start
it off in Photoshop, because that one’s
probably easier to understand, and then I’ll show
you how to do it in Premiere Pro.
In almost all of these effects
that we create, we’re gonna have to make multiple layers.
In PC, you press Ctrl+J and it makes a copy
of the layer that was selected, and I think on
Mac, it's probably Cmd+J.
But if you don’t know the shortcut, you can
also just drag it down here to
the “New Layer” thing, and when you let
go of it, it does the same thing.
OK, so now that we have a second layer-- because with
all these blend modes, you need to draw from the layer
underneath in order to pull those details up.
So for the dream effect, the first thing
that we're gonna do is we’re gonna make this
new layer black and white.
You can completely desaturate it
by pressing Ctrl+Shift+U-- which I’m hoping
on Mac is Cmd+Shift+U-- but the way
to do without shortcuts is to click “Image,”
“Adjustments,” and then “Black & White.”
All right, so now that we have and white image on top,
we’re going to apply a blend mode.
For this one, the blend mode we're gonna use is Overlay.
See, there’s already sort of a cool
effect happening here.
You know, it's kind of neat in its own right,
but it's not completely desaturated,
even though we took it from a completely desaturated layer.
When we had it on “Normal,” there was no colour,
but when we switched it to “Overlay,” we see colour.
There’s colour here, there’s colour on the Rubik's Cube,
and this is because, like I said, Overlay works
by multiplying the input colour channel values
when the colour is lighter than 50% gray.
So it’s not being applied to everything,
so it’s not completely desaturated.
So now what we do to make the effect
more of the dream effect I was talking about,
we're gonna apply a Gaussian blur.
So I'll show you the regular way to do that.
If you go “Filter,” “Blur,” “Gaussian Blur,” and the amount
that we're gonna use in Photoshop-- because it’s
a different tool in Photoshop than it is in Premiere Pro--
we’re going to use a 20-pixel radius.
When you press “OK,” you'll see what happens now
is there's a blur effect,
but the light spots that broke through
from the Black & White layer are being kind of
glowed around the top layer.
And it doesn't work the same way if you just apply a blur.
So let's hide this layer by just pressing the little
eye button, and if we choose a layer underneath, this was
our regular image, let’s just blur
this image and see what happens.
It just looks blurry. There's no details.
It's not a cool effect, it just looks like you're out of focus.
But when we apply the blur to the Overlay
layer that was black and white, you get this
really kinda dreamy thing. Like, look what happens to
the lights, look what happens around my skin.
That’s the dream effect,
and it’s really, really easy. New layer, desaturate it,
set it to “Overlay,” and put a 20-pixel
radius Gaussian blur on it.
Now let’s jump over to Premiere Pro and show you how to
do the same thing. So here’s our shot in Premiere Pro.
So we’re gonna come over here to your project, you’re gonna
right-click somewhere in an open area, choose “New Item,”
and choose “Adjustment Layer.” Now, the default settings
will be the same settings as your sequence,
so usually you can just leave it and press “OK.”
Now that we have our adjustment layer created here
in the project, just take it
and put it down on top, and you can expand it so
that the effect will be applied for the duration of the video.
Now, the adjustment layer, you can apply the same
effects to it that you would have applied in Photoshop
to your second layer up here. So what does that mean?
Well, first of all, we have to desaturate it.
But you press your “Desaturation” buttons like
you would in Photoshop, because they don’t work in Premiere Pro.
But what you can do is up in “Effects” here,
you can just type in “black white,” and you’ll get
an effect in “Video Effects,” “Image Control,”
it’s called “Black & White.” Now just take that and drag it,
and put it on the adjustment layer, and boom,
your image turns to black and white.
Great. So now that we have a desaturated
image, what do we have to do next?
Well, we need to change the blend mode
to “Overlay,” and if we have the adjustment
layer selected here, under the “Effect Controls”
we have “Opacity,” and inside of “Opacity” is “Blend Mode.”
If we change that to “Overlay,” you’ll see that the complex
effects are still separated the same way here.
“Overlay,” “Soft Light,” “Linear Light,” “Hard Mix.”
So we’re gonna choose “Overlay,” and we get that same
kind of look that we got in Photoshop.
It’s really cool, but we want to
give it that dream effect right?
So what do we have to do? We have to add a Gaussian blur.
So for this, same thing, go up into “Effects” and type
in “Gaussian,” and you’ll see “Gaussian Blur”
under “Video Effects,” “Blur & Sharpen,” “Gaussian Blur.”
Same way: grab it, drag it, drop it on
the adjustment layer, now underneath Black & White--
so you can turn your effects on and off here. You can turn off
your Black & White by just pressing the “FX,” and you can
turn off your Gaussian Blur the same way.
Now, these effects don’t operate exactly the same way, so we have
to kinda find the equivalent if you want to make the same look.
So under “Gaussian Blur” here, where it says “Blurriness,” all
you have is a value, basically, that goes from 0 to 50.
It's not the same idea as where you choose how many pixel radius
you want the blur to be applied.
But I find that if you type somewhere between 40 and 50
it’s a similar thing to about 20 pixels
in Photoshop, so we’re gonna just go ahead
and put in a 50 Blurriness here.
And so we can kind of see what this looks like now with
that effect, and we’ll jump over to Photoshop...
and look, it’s very, very, very similar.
So this is Photoshop... and this is Premiere Pro.
So that's how you make the dreamlike effect.
I’ll just play it for a second and you can see,
’cause it works well in video, too.
It just gives it this kind of blurry,
desaturated, glowy, kind of dreamlike
effect, and I think it’s a pretty cool effect
that you can use if you’re trying to tell a story,
or you’re trying to make an image look a certain way.
OK, so the final effect I want to show you is the coolest one.
It’s the one that’s sought after a lot.
I call it the “crunchy effect.”
I describe it as a “crunchy” picture,
and you’ll see what I mean in a second, but the closest way
I can describe it is it’s kind of a combination between
that in-camera HDR effect, which-- I'll show you an example
of what I mean as we do it-- and a mixture of the Clarity toggle,
which you'll find in Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop
and also in Lightroom, that Clarity slider.
But how do you create that in Premiere Pro?
Because there’s no Clarity slider,
there’s no Camera Raw, you can’t do it, right?
I'm gonna show you how to do it in Photoshop without using
Camera Raw-- because what if you want to
do it to an old JPEG?--
and then we're gonna use the same practices
to carry it over into Premiere Pro.
I think this is a really cool effect.
Now, for this one, we're gonna need two copies.
Let's just go ahead and duplicate
our background layer twice,
right out the gate, so we've got three
versions of our photo here.
Now, for the middle version-- and I'll turn
these things off so you can see them as they go.
So I'm only gonna leave the second layer on right now.
For this one, the first thing that we're gonna use
is we're gonna turn it black and white again, OK?
So Ctrl+Shift+U, or “Image Adjustments,”
“Black & White.” And then we're going to also
invert it, which means to turn it so
that the blacks are white and the whites are black.
So that is Ctrl+I, probably Cmd+I on Mac.
Now what we’re going to do is we’re going to set
the blend mode to “Soft Light.”
We’re going to now apply our Gaussian blur again.
We’re gonna leave it on 20 pixels.
Now, for those of you that knew what I was talking about,
about clarity or in-camera HDR,
you can probably already see a bit of what I'm talking about.
And it is kind of a cool effect, but to me,
it seems unfinished. So for the next step,
we’re gonna turn on the top layer, we’re gonna
use that “Linear Light” that we were talking
about, and boom! See that?
You see how the bright stuff just
gets extreme, and the dark stuff gets really, really dark?
So we're gonna set the opacity of it to 33%.
Balances the photo a little bit, but it still doesn't
look right, so we need to make adjustments.
The Soft Light layer is going to get a brightness adjustment.
So, in Photoshop, we can apply
a Brightness Adjustment Layer here.
And if you ever want a layer to only affect the layer
directly beneath it, if you right-click on it and choose
“Create Clipping Mask,” this will make it so
that layer only affects the one directly below it.
So this one, we’re gonna lower the brightness down until...
I don’t know, it seems about the right
sort of luminance a little bit in the shadows.
Then we're gonna leave it like that.
And then for the Linear Light layer,
we're going to adjust the saturation.
We're not just gonna take all the saturation away like
we have in previous effects, we’re gonna dial it in.
So there's a “Hue/Saturation” adjustment layer you can make,
which looks like this one, and we'll create a clipping mask on
that too so that it only affects the layer directly below it.
Then we just take the Saturation toggle, which is the one in
the middle here, and we bring that down a little bit as well.
You can also adjust the opacity of the Linear Light
layer to increase the strength of
how the Linear Light part is coming through.
Maybe you want to increase the opacity
a little bit, so a little bit more
of the Linear Light effect shows up.
And you can decrease a little bit the opacity
of the Soft Light layer if you want to take away some
of that in-camera HDR effect that I was talking about.
This is what the regular picture looked like,
and this is with the effect on.
So this is what I call the “crunchy effect,”
where your shadows are brought up--
so the shadows are kind of darker here, so we have
a bit of an HDR thing where the shadows are brought up--
but you get these sort of thick lines around things,
you still get some of that cell-shaded look.
The skin tones are really kind of pushed between
a bleach and a blackout area,
and overall, it gives it a very unique look,
which is sort of somewhere between HDR and Clarity.
Let's now apply them in Premiere Pro so
you can see what it looks like in the video
footage, because I think it really shines
in Premiere Pro. So we’re gonna go ahead
and we’re gonna get rid of the adjustment layer,
and we’re gonna bring a fresh one in.
OK, expand it over all the way, do the same thing,
and we’re gonna make a second adjustment layer here.
Again, so that we can use the same sort of sense of how to
apply things in a separate way.
So what do we do on the bottom layer?
Well, we use the “Soft Light”
Blend Mode, so we can just go ahead-- the order
in which you apply these things isn’t that important,
so you can put the Soft Light on first of all.
And I know that in Photoshop we set it to,
say, around 80%, so let's do 80%.
We also made this layer black and white, so remember to type
in “black white” in the Effects and then drop it down here.
We also inverted this layer, so same idea, just type in “invert”
in your Effects, and you’ll get “Video Effects,” “Channel,”
“Invert,” and throw that on there, so now it's inverted.
And we also used a Gaussian blur.
So “Gaussian,”
grab the Gaussian Blur, throw it down.
And one that’s equivalent to 20 pixels
would be a Blurriness of about 50.
OK, so now on the top layer, we used
“Linear Light” as our Blend Mode, and we had
that turned down a bit, somewhere around 40% opacity.
And what we adjusted in
the Linear Light layer was the saturation.
Now, you can apply an effect to that, but if you use
Lumetri Color, I have my Saturation dial right here.
So I'm gonna bring the saturation down
to a spot where I'm a little bit
more comfortable with it, like that.
I'm gonna change this frame, because I look ridiculous
on the frame, so I’m just gonna change it to here so I could see
my face a little bit better, and I’m gonna set the saturation.
And on the second layer, it was the brightness that we adjusted.
We’ll just increase or decrease the exposure
until we like the way that it looks.
Do you see that kind of
intensity around the face, how the skin works,
how the shadows are still popping, and you still preserve
the detail on the shadows? It kind of looks like you're
just increasing the clarity when you apply it on.
And it’s a neat effect, and it can
be dialed in to however you like it.
Here's a really crunchy version of it by adjusting
the opacity of Linear Light up a little bit more,
and putting the opacity of the Soft Light down.
This allows more of the Linear Light
in, which gives it even more of
sort of an “edginess” kind of look.
All right, guys, that's it. I really hope you enjoyed
this tutorial, and I hope I was able to shed
some light on how blend modes
work a little bit better, and maybe inspire you
to try some of your own effects. Now that you know
how Soft Light, Linear Light, and Overlay kind of work,
you can mix and match ‘em and use black and whites
and inversions and Gaussian blurs to make
all kinds of cool effects. And for any of you
that are just looking, like, “how do I get that Clarity
punch effect that I see in my Camera Raw
or my Lightroom?” This is the closest thing I can come up
to using Premiere Pro, and I think it looks pretty cool.
But sometimes you just want a nice, easy way
just to punch up your images in just a couple steps,
and learn some stuff along the way.
So I really hope you liked this video. If you did,
please make sure to give it a like, you know, share it around
if you’ve got some other photographers and video guys
that you think would be interested in learning
these tricks. And subscribe if you’d like to see
more videos like this, because I think I might
keep stealing from Peter McKinnon and keep
making fun tutorials on Tuesdays!
Alright! I'm done.
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