Go On A Magic Carpet Ride With Photoshop Blend Modes

Apologies to John Kay and Steppenwolf, but get ready to go on a magic carpet ride once you enter the world of blend modes. In the real world, if you have two sheets of paper stacked on top of each other, you usually see just the top layer.  If the paper is thin, you might see a bit of the text or image from the paper on the bottom show through the top. This has to do with the opacity of the top sheet.

In Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, you can easily change the opacity of a layer, but blend modes do even more. Blend modes determine how two or more layers interact with each other in unreal, or let’s say, magic ways. For example, you can compare a speck of color on the upper sheet of paper with a speck in the same location on the lower sheet of paper.  And let’s say your eye would only see the lightest color on either page. That’s an example of a blend. Our eyes don’t really work like that, so why don’t you “come with me little girl (or boy) on a magic carpet ride” into the world of blend modes. I’m not going to explain the more than twenty different blend modes to you. That’s too much math, even for me, and I like math. If you really want to know more, you can read this article. But, really, the best way to see what blend modes do is to just try them out for yourself.

The Example

This is the scene I wake up to every day.

 I just love the different planes created by the walls and doors. I opened this photo in Photoshop, applied a few filters to it, and came up with an interesting image.

Yeah, filters are pretty cool.* But once you know what the filters do, the results are fairly predictable. They’re no magic carpet ride. But blend modes? Well, they are the fantasy that will set you free. It’s not often exciting to blend the exact same two images together, but if you use the same image, but simply rotate one of the layers 90 degrees, you can come up with some interesting results. I made a little video of how that my abstracted photo looks, if you blend two layers (one rotated) together. And, yes, I would have loved to have used Magic Carpet Ride as the background music. Alas, it’s a copyright issue.

Blend Modes in Our Art

But don’t stop there. What if you blend two completely different photos together? We often do that when creating our fabric art. One example is where we blended a text collage with a photograph and digital painting for our Katharine McCormick quilt.

And I, Deb, created one of my favorite quilts for the Cloth in Common group I belong to by blending a photo of a real denim patchwork quilt with an image of an indigo plant and a couple of digital paintings. You can see the different layers I blended here.

Learn More

If you have Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, why don’t you open a couple of photos and take a magic carpet ride into the world of blend modes. If you want to take a class to learn to work with blend modes, think about registering for our digital design class that starts on April 5, 2021. Click here for more information.

*If you want to read our posts on using filters, check out the links here, here and here.