Photoshop: Blend Modes

If you have never played with blend modes in photoshop, you are missing out. This started out as a picture of Courtney and I added a photo I took of wood planks. One day when Kyle and I were in the Railyard Park in Santa Fe, we took a mini photo safari getting lots of texture pictures. This was one of them. 

Just to give an idea of how blend modes can interact, here is a breakdown of what I did. I started out by masking so just Courtney was showing and did some brightness/contrast fixes on her and then just on her face to get it to match the brightness of the rest of her. All of those adjustment layers used the multiply blend mode. Then I put the wood photo over top and duplicated it, blending with luminosity on one layer and color on the next. Then two more wood layers masking to add a frame blending with vivid light and hard mix. Then a curves adjustment layer with a mask for Courtney blending on overlay. I was really trying to get it to look like she was painted on the wood, but keep her bright enough to see all the detail. Lastly I did a texturizer smart filter to give that wood grain look to the Courtney part of the picture. 

I am quite happy with how it turned out.