BLEND MODES

PHOTOSHOP - Painting with Blend Modes

This technique involves using your paint brush to increase or decrease contrast in a colour image with just black and white selected, although any colour can be used to add warmth or enhance colours within a composition. Unlike overall colour changes like Selective Colour or Colour Balance where you use sliders to affect changes, this method uses your paint brush. So it is more like painting. The black and white blends with the background colour giving it depth. Here’s how we can do this.
We will use this image of an old abandoned truck near an outback Western Australian gold mine, where the tonal balance is all wrong. The actual sky had drama with a storm approaching, and the whole environment looked lonely and desolate. But (1) really shows none of this. So using your Paint Brush set to soft and Colour Burn, let’s start painting in the sky. There is no right or wrong here, it is up to you as to how you treat your composition.