Working with Tools in Paint Shop Pro 8 - More Blend Modes - Saturation, Color and More (Page 4 of 16 ) Saturation is a most unusual blend mode, with often unanticipated results. Its purpose is to adjust the saturation (the S in the HSL color model) of the base color to match that of the blend color. This blend mode doesn't take the hue or luminosity of the blend color into account at all. By turning Opacity down below 100, you can reverse the saturation effect somewhat and tone down the amount by which the base color's saturation level is changed. In our example, the light yellow stripe that is fully saturated doesn't change the underlying colors at all because they are fully saturated as well. As a result, the yellow stripe seems to disappear. The medium-saturated blue stripe in the middle retains only a bit of the red color from the gradient layer. The lightly saturated green stripe on the bottom-right becomes gray throughout, managing to erase all the red value of the fully saturated bottom layer. 
Figure 3.6 Saturation blend mode. With the Saturation blend mode, you can load your painting tool with a very pure green, apply it to a beige or tan area, and have the result be bright orange. Beige, optically speaking, is an unsaturated orange; if you resaturate a beige area to a level equivalent to that of a pure green, you get an orange result. Color blend mode has perhaps the most confusing name of the lot. This mode uses both hue (H) and saturation (S) but not luminance (L). The base color is changed to the same hue and saturation levels as the blend color, while retaining its original luminance. Thus, our three stripes retain their color and saturation levels, while changing from dark to light as a result of the underlying gradient's change in luminance values. 
Figure 3.7 Color blend mode. Luminance blend mode achieves exactly the opposite results of Color blend mode in that it doesn't apply the blend color (its hue or saturation) to the base color, but just its luminance component. Luminance blend mode applies as much whiteness to the base color as appears in the blend color, without affecting the existing "color value" from the artistic perspective. In the sample, the three stripes become various shades of red, from light to dark, based on their original luminance values. 
Figure 3.8 Luminance blend mode. Multiply blend mode appears to work very similarly to Darken blend mode, although there are important differences: With Darken blend mode, the base color is left as-is when it's already darker than the blend color. With Multiply blend mode, the darkness of the base color is compounded with the darkness of the blend color, so the result color is always darker. When used with layers, the Multiply blend mode most closely simulates the effect of laying one color transparency over another and projecting one light through both. The result in our sample is a light-orange-to-yellow stripe on the left (yellow blended with red), a dark-purple-to-blue stripe in the middle (blue blended with red), and a brownish-green-to-green stripe on the right (green blended with red). 
Figure 3.9 Multiply blend mode. In the HSL model, luminance is defined by how much whiteness a pixel contains. Luminance allows there to be a definite distinction between a light blue (a soft pastel) and a bright blue (a vibrant shade).  This chapter is from Paint Shop Pro 8, by Jennifer Fulton, (Sams, 2004, ISBN: 0672323893). Check it out at your favorite bookstore today.
Buy this book now. |
Next: Multiply Blend Mode, Screen, Dissolve and More >>
More Graphic Design Articles
More By Sams Publishing
|
/ 50 
