Blend-If Burning – ‘Autoburn’
Blend-If Burning – ‘Autoburn’
You can burn by hand, but you might make a mistake and not be able to fix it. And burning by hand can affect midtones you don’t want to touch. I hand burned the above image, it didn’t take too long and the result reflects this. Never the less, the parts we need black have been burned.
If you wanted to be able to fix an error you may have made, you can always use an adjustment layer. Quick mask all the parts you need black and then make an adjustment layer that darkens it all. It fixes the problem of not being able to undo burning, but you still have to do that for every page. What if your page knew already what you wanted black? ^^ And so our long boring ‘Getting to Know Your Options’ comes into play~ If we use ‘Blend If’ to cut out all the white, and light grey colors, then it will know where to darken, all on by itself! That could save you a lot of time, and it’s just about as accurate as hand burning.
Now, let’s face it, this isn’t perfect. You might have to brush off some of it, if it effects something you don’t want it to. (By selecting the levels mask, and using a black brush erase some of it.) But it could, with scripts, make bruning a lot faster and more automatic.
A note though, you want to be careful with layer stacking and autoburn. If you place the auto-burn under a levels layer that darkens the lines from grey to black, then aut-burn will not work. Similarly, if you place it above the layer that darkens the greys, it will cut out more. So, keep this in mind when making your script: Layer carefully.
Layer Burning & ‘Auto-Burn’
Even if you level properly you will still need to burn places that should be black, but aren’t. The WORST practise, in my opinion, is burning by hand. The reason I feel this way is because you can never undo it. There are several simple methods with which you can nicely ‘burn’, and still be able to adjust of fix things later, if you need to. The first methods is probably the simpilest way: Quick mask areas that need darkened, and then make an adjustment levels layer that does this. It will work very well and you can alter it any time.
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.
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.)
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