Photoshop Elements 8 for Windows: The Missing Manual

Blending and Smudging

You can control how Elements blends the color you add to an image with the colors that are already there. This section takes a look at two different blending methods—using blend modes to determine how the colors you paint change what's already in your image, and using the Smudge tool to literally mix parts of your image together. Blend modes are almost limitless in the ways they can manipulate images.

Blend Modes

Blend modes control how the color you add when you paint reacts with the existing pixels in an image—whether you just add color (Normal mode), make the existing color darker (Multiply mode), or change the saturation (Saturation mode).

Image-editing experts have found plenty of clever ways to use blend modes for some really sophisticated techniques. Thorough coverage of these maneuvers would turn this into a book the size of the Yellow Pages, but Figure 12-15 shows a few examples of how simply changing a brush's blend mode can radically change your results.

Figure 12-15. This photo shows the effect of some of the different blend modes when used with the Brush tool. The same color was used for each of the vertical stripes—you can see how different the result is from just changing the mode. From left to right, the modes are: Normal, Color Burn, Color Dodge, Vivid Light, Difference, and Saturation.

There are so many ways to combine blend modes that even Elements ...