Photoshop Tutorials: Photoshop Advanced Blending - Blend If

Written By Steve Patterson

In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, we're going to take a look at some of Photoshop's more advanced blending options, specifically the "Blend If" sliders. Don't let the word "advanced" scare you off, they're really very easy to use and lots of fun, and not only can they give you much better blending results than anything you could get using the standard layer blend modes, they also give you a lot more control.

We're going to be using them here to make some simple text look as if it was written on the wall behind it, but you can use them to blend any two images together for both realistic or creative effects, and as we'll see in this tutorial, using them is as easy as dragging a couple of sliders left and right.

Here's the image I'm going to be starting with, a simple photo of a rather grungy looking brick wall with some text that I've added over top of it:

Right now, it looks like, well, text in front of a brick wall. But with a little help from the "Blend If" sliders, we can make it look more like this:

Now that we know where we're headed, let's begin.