Adobe Photoshop offers a variety of blending modes to control the editing of pixels in your images. There are 28 blending options total, not including the default normal blending mode. You can layer images, elements, and opacity changes to make even more variations off of these. We’ll look over a few of these modes to see what exactly they do, and when they would be beneficial to use. If you’d like to follow along with the exact files we’re using in the video, be sure to fill out the form below and download the working file for this project.  

Dissolve

This mode is a random replacement of the pixels between the base color and the blend color.  Depending on the opacity, there will be more of the base color pixels replaced by the blend color at random pixel locations. This can work well for blending text or images onto a rough surface, like concrete.

Multiply

This mode multiplies the base color by the blend color, making a darker color. Multiplying colors with black will result in black, and white will leave the color unchanged. For the rest of the colors, layering colors will create darker and darker colors.

Overlay

Unlike the color mode, this overlay blend layer does not change the base colors. The base and blend colors are mixed, while maintaining the highlights and shadows on the base layer. This is with a 50% opacity black solid color layer on top.

Color

This blending mode is a fun way to work with color layers. The mode will blend only the luminance of the base color, keeping the hue and saturation levels of the original image colors.