Question: Do you have any idea what the following terms mean?
Multiply, Screen, Layover, Soft Light, Hard Light, Color Dodge, Color Burn, Addition, Difference, Darken, Lighten, Hue, Saturation, Color and Luminosity.
Answer (if you didn’t answer “yes” yourself): They’re blending modes. And a new iOS called Layover lets you use them to combine layered images. Still confused? Read on…
Blending modes will be familiar to anyone who uses layers in Photoshop (they even live in Photoshop Touch). When you put one layer on top of another and make the upper one transparent, you get a kind of double-exposure effect. Blending modes allow you to specify how the colors and tones in those images interact with each other (and you don’t need to lower the opacity of any layers to see the results).
The easiest way to see how they work is to play with them, but there are a few tips to get you started. “Multiply” will make the white parts of the top image transparent. Screen makes the dark parts disappear. This is most obviously useful for making white backgrounds disappear when you’re combining product shots, but has many more creative uses.
Layover (a play on the use of layers and also the super-handy Overlay mode) allows you to combine up to five layers and blend them. You can zoom and rotate layers, you can pick a single color layer to act as a base or as a filter (by moving it up and down the layer stack), you can add masks (essentially choosing which part of a layer the effects affect) and you can of course export your images.
All of this can be done in Photoshop, but as ever in the world of iOS, it’s often a lot easier, quicker and more fun to use a single-serve app for the task.
Layover is just $99 on the App Store.
Source: Layover App
