Photoshop Blend Modes - Darken

Darken

A variety of uses – some unexpected

Click to enlarge any image (except animations)

Some are unreadable if you don’t & you won’t get much

 

Fixing a bare bright sky

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What does Darken do (How does it Work)?

Adobe explanation of Darken blending (verbatim) -

Darken - Looks at the color information in each channel and selects the base or blend color—whichever is darker—as the result color. Pixels lighter than the blend color are replaced, and pixels darker than the blend color do not change.

Illustration -

Pretty straightforward & easy to understand

If you enlarge it

The blend layer is just the base layer flipped horizontally

Both are a black to white gradient

Here’s a 0′ 39″ video that shows the progression

Increasing opacity from 0-100% in 10% steps

Watch the result (bottom) layer as the

Darker tones on the right of Blend replace the Base

►

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How is Darken used?

Darken has a variety of uses.

In general it’s used to reduce unwanted highlights in the base image

This first example is illustrative

1. Often post processing introduces artifacts

HDR (& others) often produce light halos

Sharpening may create white edges

Solution (illustrated with OVER-sharpening) -

1. Create a duplicate layer of your image
2. Sharpen the duplicate
3. Change duplicate’s blend mode to Darken

100% opacity usually is best
The light areas disappear; replaced with the original colors
The sharpening remains intact

Enlarge image below for a better look

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2. As you can imagine there are many similar unwanted highlight situations.

How about a light featureless sky?

Add a layer with clouds

Use Darken to replace the light with dark

Note that in this case we place our original image

In the upper (blend) layer

The clouds are under the original (becoming the base)

Here’s the progression -

Note above (enlarge if needed) that in the lower left image which would normally be our finished result after blending the top row

Some of the blue sky had discolored the foreground

It is common that the substitute image will have some material darker than the original and thus show through

The solution is to mask out the offending areas with a mask layer as shown below

Which takes us to the final (lower right above)

You’ll find little or no mention of these specific Darken uses elsewhere

Of the several blend modes that fall into the PS “darken” category

Only Multiply gets much press

Multiply is next in this series

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What did I learn today while preparing this post?

1. These Blend Mode posts aren’t the “quickies” that I anticipated

Stretched my imagination to come up with a couple of

Undocumented Darken blend uses

2. I finally got around to tackling layer masks in PSE

Anyone up for a tutorial?

3. Using Snagit to create a screen capture video

4. Adding videos to my WordPress.com blog

Required a $ upgrade from my previous freebie

My brain’s worn out.

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Tags: Photography, Photography How To, Photography Tips, Photography Tutorial, Photoshop, Post processing