Blend Mode Graphic Design

Start by creating a selection of a person that you are going to use. Here I started to select the background with the magic wand tool and then went into quick mask mode to further define the selection.

Press Q to enter the quick mask mode and use a brush with black as your foreground color. The red area is your deselected area.  Quick masking is covered in-depth in the Basic Photoshop DVD training program because it is such a great way to get selections without too much mental anguish.

Press Q again to exit the quick mask mode and see your selection. You can also use the extract tool to get selections which works well with hair. Stay tuned for upcoming Extract tool tutorials.

You can save a selection to a channel. The .psd format will store the channel when you save the file. It is very easy to select from the channel (for example Load Selection and choose the channel) or you can save it to a work path (right click). Anytime you make a complicated selection that you may use in the future you'll probably want to save it.

You could also Layer: new layer via copy to put the selection onto its own layer. Its important to understand the different ways to do things in Photoshop.

Now use the move tool by placing it inside the selection, clicking and then dragging it to the desired document. This is the same as copy and pasting and retains the original in its place.

 

Do some scaling if needed to get the layer down to the size that you want. Here we want her to be the focal point of the design taking up most of the space. A kind of ethereal portrait.

Note that there are still light areas on her hair (from the light background originally). This is what I want because I am going to be doing some lightbleeding and other good stuff as you will see.

Drag the layer to the new layer icon to copy it and once again, I'm going to do some blending mode magic here. Put the top layer on linear burn.

Put the bottom layer on overlay. When using blending modes, you will always get slightly different results depending on your situations because the b modes mix the existing light with the layer and the (visible) layer(s) beneath it.

Here I'm going to do some lightbleeding on a layer mask with the diamond gradient tool to let the sunlight shine through part of her hair.

Go ahead and mask some more on the darker of the two layers to let some light bleed through (in this case; linear burn). The other layer will be softer and maintain the overall 'form' of the girl in this case.

Here you can see what it looks like when I turn off the darker, linear burn layer with just the overlay showing.