The power of blend modes

When you're trying to develop looks for your images, blend modes can achieve exciting results. Blend modes are used in almost all imaging applications and truly are a foundation of motion graphics and compositing. While there is a ton of content about blend modes, such as Motion 5's user manual, sometimes it's better to see for yourself and experiment with a still image. Let's take a look at a few examples.

How to do it...

Let's create a new project and add a still from Motion's library:

  1. Launch Motion. Set Preset to Broadcast HD 720p, Frame Rate to NTSC-DV, 29.97, and Duration to 10 seconds. Press OK.
  2. Click on the Library tab. Go to the Content category and select the Images subcategory. At the bottom of the Library window, double-click the Traditions folder and select the Watercolor 02 still image. In the preview area, you can see that the project's size is 2048 by 1362. That's much larger than our 1280 x 720 project.
  3. Making sure your playhead is at the beginning of the project. Click on the Apply button to add the Watercolor 02 image to the project. We're going to experiment with a few different types of looks with this abstract image by duplicating it and changing one of the layer's blending modes.
  4. With Watercolor 02 selected in the Layers tab, go to the Edit menu and choose Duplicate, as shown in the following screenshot. Select Watercolor 02 copy.
  5. Click on the Properties tab of the Inspector. Under the Blending category, set Blend Mode to Multiply, as shown in the following screenshot. The Watercolor 02 copy image blends together with the original Watercolor 02 image. Multiply looks at the darker colors in both images and multiplies them together. To see the before and after result, in the Layers tab, click on the checkmark next to Watercolor 02 copy. Click the empty box to turn the copy back on.
  6. In the Properties tab, drag the Opacity slider up and down to see how this can be combined with the Multiply blend mode. Bring the Opacity slider back up to 100.
  7. Set Blend Mode to Add. Notice how we receive a different effect. Add looks at the brighter parts of the image and adds them together.
  8. Experiment with different Blend Mode values and Opacity settings to get a feel for some of the possibilities.

See also

  • The Applying a blend mode to a gradient recipe.
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