Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Hiding Backgrounds with Blending Sliders

If the subject of your image is radically brighter or darker than its background, you’ll want to sit up and pay attention to this section. While blend modes are pretty powerful in their own right (and several of ’em can instantly pulverize a white or black background), another set of blending options in the Layer Style dialog box can eat backgrounds for lunch—nondestructively!

Photoshop gives you a few different ways to open the Layer Style dialog box (Figure 7-18). Once you’ve activated the image layer you want to work with, open the dialog box using one of the following methods:

• Double-click the layer’s thumbnail in the Layers panel.

• Click the fx at the bottom of the Layers panel and choose Blending Options.

• Choose Layer→Layer Style→Blending Options.

Note

The Blending sliders don’t work on locked background layers. So before you use them, you have to unlock the background layer by single-clicking its padlock icon in the Layers panel.

UP TO SPEED: Pass Through Mode

When you create a layer group (a folder for layers; see Grouping Layers), Pass Through appears at the top of the Layers panel’s blend mode menu. In this mode, Photoshop makes sure that any blend modes, blending slider settings, opacity settings, and fill settings you’ve applied to layers in the group trickle down to layers below the group.

For example, say you’re making a grunge collage so you’ve created a layer group consisting of several image layers set to Linear Burn mode. Pass Through ...