Book Image

Mastering Adobe Photoshop Elements 2021 - Third Edition

By : Robin Nichols
Book Image

Mastering Adobe Photoshop Elements 2021 - Third Edition

By: Robin Nichols

Overview of this book

Managing thousands of images while producing perfectly edited results is now a must-have skill for online bloggers, influencers, vloggers, social media users, and photography enthusiasts. Photoshop Elements helps you to manage this easily and boost your creative output. This third edition is updated with Elements 2021’s latest features and focuses on Adobe's AI-powered features along with the entire creative workflow. Each chapter is designed to help you get the most out of your image files in an easy way. You’ll learn how to add significant visual improvements to your work using no more than a few one-click edits with AI-driven features and manual adjustments. The book is filled with useful instructions to guide you seamlessly through the often complex processes, tools, and features in Photoshop Elements. Finally, you’ll cover everything from developing your organizational skills through to creating remarkable special effects, complex text, image combinations, and eye-popping visual techniques using both AI-driven features as well as manually operated tools. By the end of this Photoshop Elements book, you'll have learned how to leverage the impressive tools available in Photoshop Elements 2021, and use them to greatly improve your photo editing and image retouching skills.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Blend Modes

Underneath the Layer panel's row of buttons sits another drop-down menu with 24 settings—these are the Blend Modes. They only become active when two or more layers are present in the document. The default setting is Normal. It's almost impossible to provide a clear description of what Blend Modes actually do, other than to say that different Blend Modes affect the way the top layer blends with the one below it. Some appear to do nothing, while others have a radical effect.

In the following screenshots, I have created a masthead for a fake publication, Classic Car Magazine, and have changed the Blend Mode on the text layer (in this exercise, some made no change to the look of the text, so have been left out).

Left (inset): Here's the full Blend Mode menu.

As a practical exercise, I usually run through all the Blend Modes to see what works and what doesn't. It changes according to the colors, brightness, and make...