Welcome back to another very exciting tutorial here at The Photoshop Training Channel.com.
My name is Jesus Ramirez, and you can find me on Instagram @JRfromPTC.
In this tutorial I'm going to show you how to use Blend If in Photoshop, like a pro.
With the techniques that you will learn in this tutorial, you will be able to make fast
and easy sky replacements, apply textures to text, create cool special effects, and
much more.
Blend If is truly one of Photoshop's unsung heroes in an extremely powerful tool that
often gets overlooked.
Watch this tutorial all the way through, to learn everything that you need to know about
Blend If.
And let me know in the comments what you think about this amazing tool.
Okay, let's get started.
We're going to work with this graphic.
It's inside of this group, So, let me open that up.
We have two layers.
We have this graphic, and this gray background.
This graphic is going to help us illustrate how the Blend If works.
I'm going to double click to the side of the layer to bring up the layer style window.
In the bottom center of the blending options, you will see the Blend If section.
By default, it's set to gray.
But there's other options, which we'll discuss later in this tutorial.
But first, let's focus on the gray.
There's really two main sections.
The, this layer section, and the underlying section.
We're going to focus on the, this layer section, but they both basically work the same.
Whatever is selected, and currently the black and white layer is selected, is what the,
this layer will control.
Notice the black point here.
If I click and drag this to the right, watch that happens to that circle.
It starts disappearing.
That's because I'm telling Photoshop that anything that is this value of gray, 81, right
here, or darker, should be invisible.
And by the way, there's 256 levels of gray from zero, to 255.
Zero being black, and 255 being white.
And I can bring it all the way to the other side, where the only visible pixels are the
white pixels.
I can do the same thing for the white point, I can click and drag that to the left.
Now I'm telling Photoshop that anything that is 169, which is this level of gray, all the
way to white, which is at 255, should be invisible.
So, I'm using luminosity to blend layers.
One important thing to note, is that if you click and drag this, and you want to make
a smoother transition So, that you don't have a sharp line, you can hold Alt Option on the
Mac, and click on the point to split it in half.
If you spread it apart, you'll create a much smoother transition as you see there.
So, now, anything that is between 55 and 120 will gradually become transparent.
With this information we can go back into our layers here, and I have an example for
you, which is this text, which reads, "Clouds," and a background of a sky.
So, we wanted to create an effect where the clouds were covering the text, we can use
Blend If for that, to make life much easier.
So, I'm going to double click to the side of the layer, to bring up the layer style
window.
We're going to now work on the underlying layer.
That's all the layers below the currently selected layer.
We want the white pixels to come through, not the dark ones.
If we select the dark ones, you'll notice that the blue, which is darker than the white,
is going to come through, and that's not what I want.
I want to show the brighter pixels, which are the clouds.
I can click and drag this white point to the left, then hold Alt Option on the Mac, click
to split this in half, and create a much smoother transition.
And I can fine tune those, then press okay.
Now it looks as if that text is being covered by the clouds.
Really cool stuff, right?
I'm sure that you're getting a lot of ideas of how to use this, So, if you come up with
a good one, let me know in the comments.
This is an easy way of creating blends, and masking in Photoshop.
I'm going to collapse this group, and then move on to another example.
We have this texture, and this text that reads, "Rust.
" I'm going to select the texture layer, then press Ctrl Alt G, Command Option G on the
Mac, to turn that into a clipping mask.
That means that the text layer controls the visibility of the textural layer.
So, I can click and drag the texture, and place it accordingly.
Then if I want to blend the texture with the text layer, I can use the same technique.
I'm going to double click to the side of the layer to bring up the layer style window.
Looking at the texture layer, we have dark pixels, and bright pixels.
If I want to hide the black pixels, I can click on this point and drag to the right
and notice how the darker pixels start disappearing.
I can also, hold Alt Option on the Mac, click to split those in half, and just create a
smoother transition.
I could also, do the opposite.
I can hide the brighter pixels, which is this top part.
So, I can click on the white point and drag it to the left, and also, hold Alt Option
on the Mac and split those in half to create a smoother transition, and press okay when
I'm done.
And this is a live text layer, which means that I can press T for the type tool, then
click, and change the contents.
So, I can type, "PTC," and that keeps the same effect.
Now, I have one more example here for you, this one deals with color.
So, now we're going to talk about the channels that you can blend in the Blend If.
We have the color wheel here, and a gray background.
If I double click to the side of the layer of the color wheel, it will bring up the layer
style window.
I can click on this drop down to select red.
So, we have black, and we have red.
And this is a red channel by the way.
So, what we can do here is click and drag this white point, which is a red point, and
move it to the left.
That means that we're going to hide red pixels.
See how it immediately made all those red pixels transparent?
And I can keep dragging those to the left, up until we get to the opposite end.
The opposite of red is cyan, So, those are the colors that we keep.
I can do the opposite, and click and drag the black point, which will be the opposite
of red.
In this case, cyan.
And it will hide those pixels.
And just like we did before, we can hold Alt Option on the Mac, click, and split those
in half, and create smoother transitions between visible, and invisible pixels.
And, I'll quickly show you what green does.
We can hide green, the opposite of green is magenta, and that's where it stops.
Or we can hide magenta and stop at green.
Finally, we have blue.
The opposite of blue is yellow, So, that's where it will stop.
And I can hide yellow pixels and stop at blue.
And to briefly explain how all this works, I'm going to go into the channels panel, and
what the Blend If sliders are really doing is using channels to create those blends.
If you look at the red channel, notice that on the top part where we have red, it's completely
white.
And on the bottom part we have black, where cyan is.
So, when you're dragging the black and white points in Blend If, this is what it's referencing.
The green channel, the green area is white.
The opposite, magenta is black.
The blue channel, blue is white, yellow is the opposite, and it's in black.
I know that the channels panel can be confusing for beginners, but I wanted to show you how
this relationship works.
So, it's simply a way of blending pixels using channels.
I'm going to click on RGB, go back into the layers panel, So, now we're going to take
that information and apply it to this image.
What we want to do here, is replace the sky with that sky there.
But notice that this will be a complicated mask to create.
We have a bunch of trees, and we have birds, and what you might have seen in Some tutorials
it that you can create layer masks from the blue channel, and then use this to mask that
out, which certainly will work.
But in my opinion, it might take a little too long.
So, instead, we'll use Blend If, and it will use that same blue channel anyway.
So, I'm going to go back into the layers panel, then double click to the side of the trees
layers to bring up the layer style window.
And we have to think of the color that we're trying to make transparent.
So, if we're doing a sky replacement, we want to make blue transparent.
So, I'm going to go into the blue channel in the Blend If dropdown and hide the blue
from this layer.
And notice that as I do that, the underlying layer immediately comes through, and we're
done masking.
The one thing that I will do is hold Alt Option on the Mac, split those two in half to create
smoother transitions, then press okay.
So, just like that, almost as magic, we were able to replace the sky.
I can also, click and drag on the underlying layer to reposition it, and the blend updates
automatically.
There's nothing I need to do.
And keep in mind that in Some cases, you will need to adjust other channels as well.
If this is a new technique for you, let me know in the comments, and don't forget to
click on subscribe and the notification button, if this is your first time here at The Photoshop
Training Channel.
And that's it for this tutorial.
I hope that you enjoyed it, and that you learned Something new.
If you found this tutorial useful, don't forget to share it with a friend.
Thank you So, much for watching, and I will talk to you again Soon.