Two Blend Modes in Photoshop EVERY Photographer Should Know!
The other day one of my members over on my Patreon suggested I do a video on Blending Modes in Photoshop.
Well, that would take a whole heap of time as it’s quite a big subject because Blending Modes don’t just apply to layers. Brushes of all descriptions have their own unique blend modes, and so do layer groups.
There is no need to go into a great deal of detail over blend modes in order for you to start reaping their benefits.
There are TWO blend modes – Multiply and Screen – which you can start using straight away to vary the apparent exposure of your images.
And seeing as my last few videos have been concerned with exposing for highlights and ETTR in general, the use of the Multiply Layer Blending Mode will be clear to see once you’ve watched the video.
Hope the video gives you some more insight folks!
My Members over on Patreon get the benefit of being able to download the raw files used in this video.
Lightroom Classic CC Update 7.5 – August 22nd 2018
This morning I updated Lightroom Classic CC to the latest version 7.5.
And likewise I suggest you all do the same thing.
It’s not very often you hear or see me being very positive about Lightroom, but this latest iteration has me impressed for sure.
There has been the usual added camera support, together with some fangled update to the book module with some new Blurb templates – but that’s all inconsequential in my eyes and just so much froofroo.
No, the big improvement on all 3 of my machines here is one of SPEED.
And in particular, large catalogue load-speed.
I have one particular catalogue that sits on a raided pair of hard drives, and it contains just under 70,000 images.
This catalogue normally takes quite some time to open fully and it’s something of a torture-test for Lightroom.
But as of this mornings update not any more it would seem – the catalogue opened and all 69,865 previews were in place in under 10 seconds.
So would I recommend you install this latest update?
You betcha I would….always bearing in mind that Lightroom is notorious for varied performance on different individual systems – so I accept ZERO, NIL, NADA, нуль responsibility!
One negative thing that DID occur twice, but I couldn’t replicate in the video nor since – the infamous PANEL BLACKOUT.
They usually occur in the Develop module and your left and right panels just ‘black out’, and all you can see is your image.
If you do suffer a panel blackout though, don’t panic!
Just hit the G key to take you back to the Library Grid View then hit the D key to go back to the Develop module – you should get your panels back immediately.
I’ll keep you updated if I find any problems over the next few days and weeks, and if you have any problems just let me know.
When we shoot ETTR (expose to the right) in bright, harsh light, Lightroom can sometimes get the wrong idea and make a real ‘hash’ of rendering the raw file.
Sometimes it can be so bad that the less experienced photographer can get the wrong impression of their raw file exposure – and in some extreme cases they may even ‘bin’ the image thinking it irretrievably over exposed.
I’ve just uploaded a video to my YouTube channel which shows you exactly what I’m talking about:
The image was shot by my client and patron Paul Smith when he visited the Mara back in October last year, and it’s a superb demo image of just how badly Lightroom can demosaic a straight forward +1.6 Ev ETTR shot.
Importing the raw file directly into Lightroom gives us this:
But importing the raw file directly into RawTherapee with no adjustments gives us this:
Just look at the two histogram versions – Lightroom is doing some crazy stuff to the image ‘in the background’ as there are ZERO develop settings applied.
But if you watch the video you’ll see that it’s quite straight forward to regain all that apparent ‘blown detail’.
And here’s the important bit – we do so WITHOUT the use of the shadow or highlight recovery sliders. Anyone who has purchased my sharpening videos HERE knows that those two sliders can VERY EASILY cause undesirable ‘pseudo-sharpening’ halos, and they should only be used with caution.
The way I process this +1.6 stop ETTR exposure inside Lightroom has revealed all the superb mid tone detail and given us a really good image that we could take into Photoshop and improve with some precision localized adjustments.
So don’t let Lightroom control you – you need to control IT!
If you feel this article and video has been beneficial to you and would like to see more per week, then supporting my Patreon page for as little as $1 per month would be a massive help. Thanks everyone!
Over 11 hours of video training, spread across 58 videos…well, I told you it was going to be big!
And believe me, I could have made it even bigger, because there is FAR MORE to image sharpening than 99% of photographers think.
And you don’t need ANY stupid sharpener plugins – or noise reductions ones come to that. Because Photoshop does it ALL anyway, and is far more customizable and controllable than any plugin could hope to be.
So don’t waste your money any more – spend it instead, on some decent training to show you how to do the job properly in the first place!
You won’t find a lot of these methods anywhere else on the internet – free or paid for – because ‘teachers cannot teach what they don’t know’ – and I know more than most!
As you can see from the list of lessons above, I cover more than just ‘plain old sharpening’.
Traditionally, image sharpening produces artifacts – usually white and black halos – if it’s over done. And image sharpening emphasizes ‘noise’ in areas of shadow and other low frequency detail, when it’s applied to an image in the ‘traditional’, often taught, blanket manner.
Why sharpen what isn’t in focus – to do so is madness, because all you do is sharpen the noise, and cause more artifacts!
Maximum sharpening should only be applied to detail in the image that is ‘fully in focus’.
So, as ‘focus sharpness’ falls off, so to should the level of applied sharpening. That way, noise and other artifacts CAN NOT build up in an image.
And the same can be said for noise reduction, but ‘in reverse’.
So image sharpening needs to be applied in a differential manor – and that’s what this training is all about.
Using a brush in Lightroom etc to ‘brush in’ some sort of differential sharpening is NOT a good idea, because it’s imprecise, and something of a fools task.
Why do I say that? Simple……. Because the ‘differential factor bit’ is contained within the image itself – and it’s just sitting there on your computer screen WAITING for you to get stuck in and use it.
But, like everything else in modern digital photography, the knowledge and skill to do so has somehow been lost in the last 12 to 15 years, and the internet is full of ‘teachers’ who have never had these skills in the first place – hence they can’t teach ’em!
However, everyone who buys this training of mine WILL have those skills by the end of the course.
It’s been a real hard slog to produce these videos. Recording the lessons is easy – it’s the editing and video call-outs that take a lot of time. And I’ve edited all the audio in Audacity to remove breath sounds and background noise – many thanks to Curtis Judd for putting those great lessons on YouTube!
The price is £59.99. So right now, that’s over 11 hours of training for less than £5.50 per hour – that’s way cheaper than a 1to1, or even a workshop day with a crowd of other people!
So head off over to my download store and buy it, because what you’ll learn will improve your image processing, whether it’s for big prints or just jpegs on the web – guaranteed – just click here!
Become a patron from as little as $1 per month, and help me produce more free content.
Patrons gain access to a variety of FREE rewards, discounts and bonuses.
A lot of people imagine that there is some sort of ‘magic bullet’ method for sharpening images.
Well, here’s the bad news – there isn’t !
Even if you shoot the same camera and lens combo at the same settings all the time, your images will exhibit an array of various properties.
And those properties, and the ratio/mix thereof, can, and will, effect the efficacy of various sharpening methods and techniques.
And, those properties will rarely be the same from shoot to shoot.
Add interchangeable lenses, varied lighting conditions, and assorted scene brightness and contrast ranges to the mix – now the range of image properties has increased exponentially.
What are the properties of an image that can determine your approach to sharpening?
I’m not even going to attempt to list them all here, because that would be truly frightening for you.
But sharpening is all about pixels, edges and contrast. And our first ‘port of call’ with regard to all three of those items is ‘demosaicing’ and raw file conversion.
“But Andy, surely the first item should be the lens” I here you say.
No, it isn’t.
And if that were the case, then we would go one step further than that, and say that it’s the operators ability to focus the lens!
So we will take it as a given, that the lens is sharp, and the operator isn’t quite so daft as they look!
Now we have a raw file, taken with a sharp lens and focused to perfection.
Let’s hand that file to two raw converters, Lightroom and Raw Therapee:
I am Lightroom – Click me!
I am Raw Therapee – Click me!
In both raw converters there is ZERO SHARPENING being applied. (and yes, I know the horizon is ‘wonky’!).
Now check out the 800% magnification shots:
Lightroom at 800% – Click me!
Raw Therapee at 800% – Click me!
What do we see on the Lightroom shot at 800%?
A sharpening halo, but hang on, there is NO sharpening being applied.
But in Raw Therapee there is NO halo.
The halo in Lightroom is not a sharpening halo, but a demosaicing artifact that LOOKS like a sharpening halo.
It is a direct result of the demosaicing algorithm that Lightroom uses.
Raw Therapee on the other hand, has a selection of demosaicing algorithms to choose from. In this instance, it’s using its default AMaZE (Alias Minimization & Zipper Elimination) algorithm. All told, there are 10 different demosaic options in RT, though some of them are a bit ‘old hat’ now.
There is no way of altering the base demosaic in Lightroom – it is something of a fixed quantity. And while it works in an acceptable manner for the majority of shots from an ever burgeoning mass of digital camera sensors, there will ALWAYS be exceptions.
Let’s call a spade a bloody shovel and be honest – Lightrooms demosaicing algorithm is in need of an overhaul. And why something we have to pay for uses a methodology worse than something we get for free, God only knows.
It’s a common problem in Lightroom, and it’s the single biggest reason why, for example, landscape exposure blends using luminosity masks fail to work quite as smoothly as you see demonstrated on the old Tube of You.
If truth be told – and this is only my opinion – Lightroom is by no means the best raw file processor in existence today.
I say that with a degree of reservation though, because:
It’s very user friendly
It’s an excellent DAM (digital asset management) tool, possibly the best.
On the surface, it only shows its problems with very high contrast edges.
As a side note, my Top 4 raw converters/processors are:
Iridient Developer
Raw Therapee
Capture One Pro
Lightroom
Iridient is expensive and complex – but if you shoot Fuji X-Trans you are crazy if you don’t use it.
Raw Therapee is very complex (and slightly ‘clunky’ on Mac OSX) but it is very good once you know your way around it. And it’s FREEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!
Iridient and RT have zero DAM capability that’s worth talking about.
Capture One Pro is a better raw converter on the whole than Lightroom, but it’s more complex, and its DAM structure looks like it was created by crack-smoking monkeys when you compare it to the effective simplicity of Lightroom.
If we look at Lightroom as a raw processor (as opposed to raw converter) it encourages the user to employ ‘recovery’ in shadow and highlight areas.
Using BOTH can cause halos along high contrast edges, and edges where high frequency detail sits next to very low frequency detail of a contrasting colour – birds in flight against a blue sky spring to mind.
Why do I keep ‘banging on’ about edges?
Because edges are critical – and most of you guys ‘n gals hardly ever look at them close up.
All images contain areas of high and low frequency detail, and these areas require different process treatments, if you want to obtain the very best results AND want to preserve the ability to print.
Cleanly defined edges between these areas allow us to use layer masks to separate these areas in an image, and obtain the selective control.
Clean inter-tonal boundaries also allow us to separate shadows, various mid tone ranges, and highlights for yet more finite control.
Working on 16 bit images (well, 15 bit plus 1 level if truth be told) means we can control our adjustments in Photoshop within a range of 32,768 tones. And there is no way in hell that localised adjustments in Lightroom can be carried out to that degree of accuracy – fact.
I’ll let you in to a secret here! You all watch the wrong stuff on YouTube! You sit and watch a video by God knows what idiot, and then wonder why what you’ve just seen them do does NOT work for you.
That’s because you’ve not noticed one small detail – 95% of the time they are working on jpegs! And jpegs only have a tonal range of 256. It’s really easy to make luminosity selections etc on such a small tonal range work flawlessly. You try the same settings on a 16 bit image and they don’t work.
So you end up thinking it’s your fault – your image isn’t as ‘perfect’ as theirs – wrong!
It’s a tale I hear hundreds of times every year when I have folk on workshops and 1to1 tuition days. And without fail, they all wish they’d paid for the training instead of trying to follow the free stuff.
You NEVER see me on a video working with anything but raw files and full resolution 16 bit images.
My only problem is that I don’t ‘fit into’ today’s modern ‘cult of personality’!
Most adjustments in Lightroom have a global effect. Yes, we have range masks and eraser brushes. But they are very poor relations of the pixel-precise control you can have in Photoshop.
Lightroom is – in my opinion of course – becoming polluted by the ‘one stop shop, instant gratification ideology’ that seems to pervade photography today.
Someone said to me the other day that I had not done a YouTube video on the new range masking option in Lightroom. And they are quite correct.
Why?
Because it’s a gimmick – and real crappy one at that, when compared to what you can do in Photoshop.
Photoshop is the KING of image manipulation and processing. And that is a hard core, irrefutable fact. It has NO equal.
But Photoshop is a raster image editor, which means it needs to be fed a diet of real pixels. Raw converters like Lightroom use ‘virtual pixels’ – in a manner of speaking.
And of course, Lightroom and the CameraRaw plug in for Photoshop amount to the same thing. So folk who use either Lightroom or Photoshop EXCLUSIVELY are both suffering from the same problems – if they can be bothered to look for them.
It Depends on the Shot
The landscape image is by virtue, a low ISO, high resolution shot with huge depth of field, and bags of high frequency inter-tonal detail that needs sharpening correctly to its very maximum. We don’t want to sharpen the sky, as it’s sharp enough through depth of field, as is the water, and we require ZERO sharpening artifacts, and no noise amplification.
If we utilise the same sharpening workflow on the center image, then we’ll all get our heads kicked in! No woman likes to see their skin texture sharpened – in point of fact we have to make it even more unsharp, smooth and diffuse in order to avoid a trip to our local A&E department.
The cheeky Red Squirrel requires a different approach again. For starters, it’s been taken on a conventional ‘wildlife camera’ – a Nikon D4. This camera sensor has a much lower resolution than either of the camera sensors used for the previous two shots.
It is also shot from a greater distance than the foreground subjects in either of the preceding images. And most importantly, it’s at a far higher ISO value, so it has more noise in it.
All three images require SELECTIVE sharpening. But most photographers think that global sharpening is a good idea, or at least something they can ‘get away with’.
If you are a photographer who wants to do nothing else but post to Facebook and Flickr then you might as well stop reading this post. Good luck to you and enjoy your photography, but everything you read in this post, or anywhere on this blog, is not for you.
But if you want to maximize the potential of your thousands of pounds worth of camera gear, and print or sell your images, then I hate to tell you, but you are going to have to LEARN STUFF.
Photoshop is where the magic happens.
As I said earlier, Photoshop is a raster image processor. As such, it needs to be fed an original image that is of THE UTMOST QUALITY. By this I mean a starting raw file that has been demosaiced and normalized to:
Contain ZERO demosaic artifacts of any kind.
Have the correct white and black points – in other words ZERO blown highlights or blocked shadows. In other words, getting contrast under control.
Maximize the midtones to tease out the highest amount of those inter-tonal details, because this is where your sharpening is going to take place.
Contain no more sharpening than you can get away with, and certainly NOT the amount of sharpening you require in the finished image.
With points 1 thru 3 the benefits should be fairly obvious to you, but if you think about it for a second, the image described is rather ‘flattish – looking’.
But point 4 is somewhat ambiguous. What Adobe-philes like to call capture or input sharpening is very dependent on three variables:
Sensor megapixels
Demosaic effeciency
Sharpening method – namely Unsharp Mask or Deconvolution
The three are inextricably intertwined – so basically it’s a balancing act.
To learn this requires practice!
And to that end I’m embarking on the production of a set of videos that will help you get to grips with the variety of sharpening techniques that I use, and why I use them.
I’ll give you fair warning now – when finished it will be neither CHEAP nor SHORT, but it will be very instructive!
I want to get it to you as soon as possible, but you wouldn’t believe how long tuition videos take to produce. So right now I’m going to say it should be ready at the end of February or early March.
UPDATE: The new course is ready and on sale now, over on my digital download site.
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