Aerandria Staff

Under your blending options there are three sections: General Blending, Advanced Blending, & Blend If.

General blending – ‘Blend Mode’ is basically how the layer you’re adjusting is blended with the layers below it. Each mode effects the leyers below in unique ways. To understand this more try playing with them or reading about how each of them work. On a group the blend mode is set to ‘Pass Through’ by default. It means that all blending modes used in the group will also effect everything outside of the group, below it. (If a groups blending mode is set to normal, it will stop the groups inner layers and their blending modes from effecting the layers below it.) ‘Layer opacity’ is the entire layers opacity and the opacity of all styles/effects (stroke, drop shadow, pattern overlay, ect.).

Advanced Blending – ‘Fill Opacity’ is the opacity of the layer itself, and does not set the opacity for strokes ect. ‘Channels’ uses the greyscale data on the layer you’re adjusting to alter the color channels of the layers below (generally following the pattern; Black parts of the layer are used to alter the below layers via something comparable to RGB, and the White parts of the layer are used to alter the below layers via the equivalent of CMYK). ‘Knockout’ should be used on a layer in a group. When Knockout is set to ‘Deep’ the group will not alter an layers below it, and will pass through them, straight down to the background layer. (And if that isn’t set, is will pass through them all.) When set to ‘Shallow’ it will not alter the very next layer that is visable, outside of the group, but will effect all layers after. The check boxes are pretty self evident: ‘Layer mask hides effects’ & ‘Vector mask hides effects’ means that a layer/vector mask will also cut strokes, & drop shadows. They treat the layer and it’s styles/effects as one layer, together. This is useful for typesetting and whatnot, when you don’t want effects to go around what you’ve just cut away with a mask.

Blend If – These settings are quite useful, as they allow you to ‘cut out’ parts of the current layer via it’s own colors, or the layer below it via it’s respective colors. (And both.) Using the drop down, you select which channel you want to use (Red, Green, Blue & Gray).

Picture time! Blend If & ‘Cutting out’

In order to fully understand how this works I’m going to use two layers, one of a pattern and one of a basic red layer.

Dragging the bottom slider, named ‘Underlining Layer’, will cut out the current layer depending on the layer below it. On the ‘Gray’ setting, moving the white slider to the left cuts out the current layer where the layers below it are white:

If you were to drag the other slider, the black one, it would do the opposite; It would cut out the layer where the black shades are, on the layers below it:

Now, the edges are very sharp like this. But luckily there’s a way to soften them up. We’re going to go back to cutting out based on the white parts, with the white slider. OK, if you Alt + click on the white slider it will seperate. This makes two little white halves. The first half, on the left, will be how far you want to cut; The second half is how far you want to soften. Basically, you can think of it as an opacity – the left half is 100%, and the right half is 0% opacity. (I’m not going to go into how this actually works.) It’s similar with the black slider, only the slider halves are reversed: left half is 0% and the right is 100%.

The top sliders, named ‘This Layer’, do the same thing, only they do it to the layer you’re adjusting. To show it best, I am using a layer with a pattern:

You can also combine the effects, using both sliders:

For more advanced blending, with photos and images, you’ll can use each of the color fields and their respective sliders. Like, for example, if you selected blue, and moved the white slider, you would cut out the pattern layer where the the below layers don’t have a sade of blue. If you moved the black slider it would do the opposite; It would cut out the pattern layer where the below layers do have a shade of blue. (I know, it doesn’t quite make sense like this, but it’s actually based on the rgb channel.)