Photoshop Blend Tool: How to Merge Images Into One in Photoshop
Henry Cooper
⚡ Smart Summary
Blend Modes in Photoshop are a way to blend the pixels of two images to create different effects. This resource explains what blend modes are and walks through blending two images step by step, covering the darken, lighten, contrast, inverted, and color groups.
What is Blend Modes?
Blend Modes in Photoshop are a tool to blend the pixels of two images with each other to get different types of effects. Blend modes are popular among designers. They help you to correct photos and convert lighter images to darker or darker images to lighter. They also allow you to create several types of effects for specific images.
How to Blend Colors in Photoshop
Below is a step-by-step process on how to blend in Photoshop:
Step 1) Select the Image for Background
Here I have a rough texture image for my background. I will use another image to blend in Photoshop with this background.
Step 2) Select the Image whose background needs to change
Let me take another image to blend two images in Photoshop with the background texture.
So here are two different layers. To apply a blending mode, you need to select the layer, open the blend mode list, and choose any one of them.
Step 3) Types of Blend Modes
The blend mode menu is at the top of the layer panel, and by default, it is always on Normal mode.
There are various types of Photoshop blending modes grouped in various categories in the list. You can choose any one of them and create a different effect using the blend tool in Photoshop. In the blending mode list, each group of blend modes has specific functions.
The first section here darkens the image. It affects the overall darkness of the picture.
The second group affects the overall brightness of the image. It allows lighter areas to show through and makes darker areas drop back.
The next group affects the lightness and darkness. I choose Overlay here.
The next group of the Photoshop blending tool creates inverted effects.
And the last group in the list deals with the colors of the image.
You can also change blend modes sequentially by pressing the up and down arrow keys in the blending tool in Photoshop.
Step 4) Apply Blend to the Image
“Multiply” is a better option for this image. It gives a striking look to this image.
We can also get blending modes in the “Layer Style panel”. For that, let me draw a new shape, then give some layer style to it so that we can check blending modes there in the “Layer Style panel”. Let me check on “Outer Glow” and set its parameters. Now you can see on top the same list of blend modes over here, which was in the blend mode menu out there in the “layer panel”. You can choose any blend mode you want.
One more thing is that you can play with the “opacity of a layer” when using the Photoshop blend tool to get a better result. See, I am using Color Burn mode. I liked this blending effect in Photoshop, but it has over-brightened the image. So I can drag down the opacity of the background layer to set the image properly. Now you can see the difference.
Now I hope you got the basic idea of how powerful a feature the “blend mode” is.
