Micro Tutorial: Advanced Blending in PS

Credits Here

I did this page for an ad-inspiration challenge. These are such terrific challenges that Lilja hosts.  It makes me stop and look at images in a new way, analyze what about them inspires me, and see where my imagination goes from there!  In this case, I really liked the urban city-scape and was struck by the shapes of the graffiti and the bright colors.  I had no clue what I would make, but I knew those were elements I wanted to incorporate.

Here's the inspiration image:

Here's a micro-tutorial on blending techniques I used for this page.

There are some interesting attributes you can add to a layer in Photoshop's Layer Styles menu.  Here, I played with the Underlying Layer blending to make the chalk graffiti look more realistic on the corrugated wall.  For the white frame, I slid the black marker to the right some, and the white marker to the left, until I was happy with the look.  I repeated the same technique on the splatters and other chalk elements.  This is a really helpful blending technique with text on a page, as well, particularly for art journaling style pages.

Here's an example of using it with text, and I took it just a step further.

Credit

You can also divide the sliders in the same area by holding down the Option (Alt) key then clicking the slider.  This gives you even more control when fine-tuning the blending.  Here, I divided both the light and dark blending.  Note how the text almost disappears on the dark wood of the door, and it is also faded on the lighter shades of wood?

One more thing to note, when you use these blend modes, you see a slightly different icon in your Layers Palette, two intersecting boxes.  This indicates you are using advanced blending options.

What's a technique that you use and think is sometimes overlooked?