Summary

We have completed one of the most fundamental and confusing concepts in digital art and came out on the other side. Earlier in this chapter, I used the term blend mode roulette. This statement is as true as when I began editing, because you will never know everything about blend modes, and you will never be able to fully anticipate the effect, given the endless variety of the images they apply to.

We need to treat the blend modes as our spices in our cooking analogy—a bit of Multiply and a dash of Lighten—in order to make our edits stand out to be unique and really be ours. So, play around, try some stuff, and if it doesn’t work, just change the blend mode back.

Lastly, the application of blend ranges allows us to be very specific in the application of the technique but requires a firm understanding of how to arrive at the right blend mode as a prerequisite. We learned that the application of blend ranges in complex images (such as the sky) allows...