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One of the things that you're going to discover throughout this course once you
kind of get a better understanding of what blend modes are, you are going to
start noticing that they are everywhere inside Photoshop. You can take
advantage of them in many different locations. The one that we'll spend the most time on
of course is the Layer Blending Mode list here at the top of the Layers panel. You can
see that the texture layer is right now set to Soft Light and if you
go to this pop-up menu you can see all the other different blend modes.
But that's not the only location where you can access blend modes. For instance
if I type B on my keyboard to get the Brush tool, the options for the current
Painting tool also have this Blending Mode list. So you can actually paint in
different blend modes. If you were to run a filter, let's say we
ran a Gaussian Blur filter on this layer, click OK and then we go to the Edit > Fade
command, you'll see that there's the Blend Mode list here, you can
fade the last thing you did, not only it's Opacity, one type of blending, but also
choose the blend mode of that Fade and OK there.
If you go into the Layer Style dialog, I'll double-click on this layer and
you will see that within each given effect like if I click on Drop Shadow, there's
a blend mode for the Drop Shadow effect. If I go to say Pattern Overlay there's
a Blend Mode list there. Eee, ugly bubbles but let's blend those away so that we can
barely see them, right, and you guys get the idea.
So blend modes exist in lots of different locations. Once you learn the basics
and how they work, you'll be able to apply them to all sorts of different tasks
and special effects. Anytime you see that word Normal or any other type of
blend mode look for that little pop-up menu and start playing around for those options.