Photoshop Blending Modes Cookbook for Digital Photographers

Advanced Photoshop Magazine, January, 2006
"A thorough hands-on set of lessons on the mysteries of one of Photoshop's most powerful features. Read and learn."

The power of Adobe's flagship application, Photoshop, is legendary. Buried deep within its palettes, menus, tools, and dialog boxes lie features that are either so little understood or simply so demanding of time that they have never had their full potential aired. One of these features, "blending modes", controls how pixels in an image are affected by combining the image with the same - or another - image. In itself, a simple enough process. However, the sheer number and variety of options, and the way different colours behave when blends are applied, means that it requires endless hours of trial and error to discover how a particular blending mode - or combination of blends - will affect an image. And now, with the recent explosion of the digital photography phenomenon, a whole new variety of image-maker has entered the Photoshop studio: the digital "art" photographer. These enthusiasts, with their voracious appetite for creative imagery, demand an easy route into learning everything that Photoshop has to offer. Amazingly, no book has ever attempted to exploit and explain the hidden power of this incredible feature of Photoshop - until now.

The Photoshop Blending Modes Cookbook for Digital Photographers explains everything there is to know about blending modes - how they work and what they can be used for - and provides, in a clearly laid out format, hundreds of ready made recipes for the enthusiast to examine, without having to waste hours on fruitless experimentation.