mrakonni

Hi all, I'm a bit late to the party, but there is a simple workaround for most blending modes that might help you. The "additive" ones foremost (add, color dodge, the ones that do the glares and the rays and the glowsies :)) This is what it looks like: TLDR: - Make a new layer and fill it with 100% black color. On top of that layer put any layer you want to blend. - Put both of them in a group and assign the blend mode you want to the group, not the layers in it. - If the mode is color dodge, for example, you will notice the black layer disappear. That's good! - Now adjust the opacity of the layer you put above the black layer (not the group) and... voila! - Don't touch the background (black) layer or group opacity, they need to stay 100% all the time. (Unless you want to experiment later) For other blending modes u need white (eg - color burn), 50% gray (vivid light) or none at all. Play with them, put a background (the bottom most layer) in a group and fill it with either black, white, 50% gray, or turn the background off completely. Pick a mode for the group and if the background turns transparent - that's the one u need. If you realize you do not need a background - you don't need the group, use the layer alone. Notes: The "background layer" does not need to cover the whole document. It needs to cover as much as the layer above it, so you can crop it later. If you merge (rasterize) the group it will blend properly, but if you change the opacity again it will break. I leave them in a group, personally, because you can paint in details or add layer effects to the layer you want to blend and they blend better. If you add more layers in this group, note that they will first blend with each other and then the background, and all of them together under the mode of the group - so feel free to experiment. The long read: Coming from someone who can't math to save his life: the problem is the way they are doing color math. Not saying they are doing it wrong, it's just that their approach is different because (I assume) they are using the GPU to do the work, and also the way their graphics engine works. I do game art mostly and I came across this in older game engines. We had glare and sun ray (gradients) assets that where transparent PNGs and they blended poorly. To blend properly you need a "full" pixel, not a "see through" one. If the pixel is transparent the math goes byebye. Photoshop's fill slider (and layer effects, too) somehow blend as if the pixel is not transparent, and yet it changes transparency (I know, but someone that does OpenGL dev, for example, can explain this better than I ). 😄 There is a "take transparency data and +black or +white or plus 50% gray" thingie to add to the blend mode code somewhere and it should behave properly. Yes, say hi to "designer math", haha. 😄 Adobe broke blending modes in Photoshop a few years ago and the same workaround worked there, until they added the "Transparency shapes layer" checkbox in layer options, and that helped a lot in certain scenarios. What that actually does, I have no idea, but it blends with a punch. Sorry for the long post, hope it helps! Cheers!