Love ‘em or hate ‘em blending modes should be part of every photographer’s Photoshop arsenal. Last week we introduced the idea of blending modes as a photo editing tool, this week we’re going to continue that line of thought and use the darkening group of blending modes to help correct an image that is over exposed and flat.

The blending modes menu is divided into 6 sections. This series is aimed at photographers, and there are a number of great blending modes that, while great for designers, really don’t have a lot of practical application in photo editing. Now I’m not a big fan of wasting time, yours or mine, so we’re going to skip over those and look at the modes that I deem most applicable. As such we’re going to jump to the second group of blending modes, the darkening modes, which is made up of darken, multiply, color burn, and liner burn. As the title implies all of the modes in this group will make your image darker.

Here’s our original image: as previously mentioned it’s flat and over exposed.  All of the blends we’ll be doing today are self blends, meaning we’re blending our original image with copies of its self.

 You’ll notice that we’re skipping over darken mode, although it does just what its name implies (technically speaking it looks at the pixels in each layer and displays whichever is darker) it’s really not all that useful in photo editing, and doesn’t work in a self blend.

Multiply Mode: Multiply compares the base layer and the blend layer and multiplies the colors. In multiply mode the resulting image is always darker than the original, although it is important to note that because the darkening effect is multiplied, the shadows will be affected more than the highlights.

 

Color Burn: Color burn darkens the image by adding contrast. The resulting image will be darker, more saturated, and have more contrast.

 

Liner Burn: Although liner burn is similar to color burn it increases darkness rather than saturation. The results will be similar to those of multiply, but more intense (it is often a happy medium when color burn is too much and multiply is not enough).

 

Even knowing and understanding what each blending mode does, the best way to get great results from them is to play. Combining blending modes with blurs, inverses, and other blending modes can create some fun images. The image below is created by blending the base layer with an inverse of its self (cmd/ctrl + I) using color burn.

 

 

Although it is a funky effect, it’s probably not one most photographers are going for. Combine it with two more blend layers however, and we’re starting to get somewhere. The image below is created using (from bottom to top) base layer, self blend with inversed color mode layer at 39% opacity+ self blend with regular color mode layer at 100% opacity + self blend with an overlay blending mode at 80% opacity.

 

Now’s the time to pull out some old, flat, underexposed images that you may have previously trashed, and play around with the darkening blending modes. You may get some fantastic “keepers” out of them after all.