Datasheet

26 chapter 1 Tools for Building Your Masterpiece
Discovering the Power of Blend If
My good friend Richard Lynch, whom you may know from his Hidden Power books, also
published by Sybex, started talking to me about Blend If a few years ago. A typical conver-
sation may have sounded like a Laurel and Hardy routine:
RL: Al, you’ve got to try Blend If.
AW: Blend what?
RL: Blend If.
AW: Blend if what? What am I blending and why?
RL: Blend If, man! It’s the newest thing out there… youre nobody until you get on the
Blend If bandwagon!
AW: Dude, I don’t know what youre selling, but get it outta here or I’ll call the cops. If
it’s that cool, it can’t be legal.
Well, maybe the conversation didn’t go exactly like that. But it did pique my interest,
especially because his books were the only ones I’d found that even broached the topic. So
after much experimenting, head-scratching, and throwing digital paper balls in the cyber-
trash, I think (think, mind you) that I’m starting to grasp what he’s been telling me all these
years. At least from a right-brained point of view, I’ve found a few cool tricks that Blend If
can be used for.
Blend If allows you to manipulate how certain colors will react to the color beneath
them. Granted, this sounds similar to blending modes, but Blend If is a bit more powerful in
that it gives the user control over specific colors in the layer, and not over the entire layer.
For this example, open the image
Wall.jpg. I’ve already taken care of generating a dis-
placement map of the wall and applied it to a rasterized type layer. The result is seen in
Figure 1.59. Just to prove it to you, Figure 1.60 shows the Layers panel, complete with ras-
terized text.
Blend If is found in the Blending options of the layer styles, at the top of the left-hand
Layer Style dialog box. Not only can you use this cool feature to make the text appear
painted onto the wall, but with a little Photoshop magic you can make it appear as though it
has aged with the wall, even wiping away those areas of text where the bricks have broken
and worn away.
Figure 1.59 Wall photo
with a rasterized type
layer, pre-distorted with a
displacement map
Figure 1.60 The type has already been conformed to the cracks and
mortar in the wall image.
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