From the course: Photoshop One-on-One: Advanced

Normal and Dissolve - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop One-on-One: Advanced

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Normal and Dissolve

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- [Instructor] All right, so here we are looking at a list of what I'm calling the 27 common blend modes which appear at a handful of different locations inside Photoshop. But most notably, inside this pop-up menu here inside the layers panel. And so as you can see, the 27 common blend modes begin with normal and they end with luminosity. And we're going to be discussing every single one of these blend modes in order and by group. So notice that each group is distinguished from the next by a horizontal line. That not only appears inside my illustration, but it appears in the actual pop-up menu as well. And we're going to start things off with the first two blend modes, normal and dissolve. Now technically normal is not a blend mode. It's the equivalent of turning the blend mode off because it involves no special math. Whereas dissolve, dithers translucency. And let me show you what I mean by that. I'll go ahead and switch over to this image which we're going to eventually turn into this effect right here. But first I'm going to go ahead and click on the sign layer, here inside the layers panel. And then, I'll create a new layer by pressing Control + Shift + N or Command + Shift + N on the Mac. And I'll just go ahead and call this layer black and then click okay. All right now, I'll switch from the rectangular marquee to the elliptical marquee and we'll go ahead and draw a big marquee like so. And then assuming that your foreground color is black you can press Alt + Backspace or Option + Delete on the Mac in order to fill the selection with the foreground color and then I'll press Control + D or Command + D on the Mac to de-select the image. All right now upfront I need to establish some baseline vocabulary starting with opaque. So an opaque pixel is one that you cannot see through at all as is the case with the interior of this ellipse. A transparent pixel is one that you can see through all the way, whether the pixels don't really exist in the layer or they're masked away. And then finally, anything in between is considered to be translucency. In your standard everyday average eight-bit per channel image offers 254 levels of translucency plus opaque and transparency. So 256 levels in all. To see that translucency, I'll go up to the filter menu, choose blur and then choose Gaussian blur. And I'm going to go ahead and crank this radius value up to 100 pixels and then I'll click okay. And now, if I were to zoom in here you can see that the layer is opaque around this region it's transparent way out here, and it contains various levels of translucency in between. Notice what happens however, if I switch to the dissolve mode. Now the first thing I want you to notice is that we can now preview blend modes on the fly which can be quite useful and to do so all you have to do is hover over the blend mode. And so this is what dissolve looks like. And so, in other words we no longer have any translucent pixels. We either have opaque pixels over in a region where the layer is actually opaque or we have transparent pixels out here with the layers transparent. And then all the levels of translucency are represented by pixels that are either fully opaque or fully transparent. And so where we have more opacity we have more pixels, where we have less opacity we have fewer pixels. And this applies to reduced opacity values as well. So for example, I'll go ahead and switch over to the exit layer and I'll change it from normal to dissolve. And notice that all the anti-aliasing around the edges of these hand drawn layers ends up getting pixelated. It gets even worse if we reduce the opacity value. Now, I want you to notice that the blend mode is sticky here on the PC. And so if you want to unstick it you have to either press the escape key or the enter key that it's not necessary on the Mac but the reason I'm doing it is so that I can reduce the opacity value by pressing for example, the five key, which is going to take that opacity value next door to the blend mode pop-up menu down to 50%. At which point half of our pixels are opaque and half of them are transparent. If we want more pixels to be transparent then you can reduce the opacity value. For example, this is how things look at 30%. If you want more pixels to be opaque then you increase the opacity value. For example, this is how things look at 70%. All right, now, thanks to the fact that the blend mode pop-up menu is sticky here on the PC, you might want to know about a very basic shortcut that does not stick the blend mode as we're seeing in this case. And that is Shift + plus or Shift + Minus. And so I'm going to press the escape key so that the blend mode is no longer active. Again, you don't have to do that on the Mac and then I'll press Shift + Plus to advance from the normal blend mode to the next mode in the pop-up menu, which is dissolve. If you want to go backwards, then just press Shift + Minus. And that's going to work the same on both the Mac and the PC. And that's how you take advantage of the non blend mode normal, as well as the unusual blend mode dissolve here inside Photoshop.

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