Photoshop Tutorials: Photoshop Advanced Blending - Blend If

Step 5: Smooth Out The Blending By Splitting The Slider Bars In Two

To smooth out the blending and create more of a transition between the two layers, I'm going to hold down the Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) key and drag the black slider back towards the left. Holding down the Alt/Option key causes the slider to split in half, as we can see here:

With the black slider now split in two, the half on the left is where the blending begins, the half on the right is where the blending reaches 100%, and the area in between is the transition area. I can now drag both halves independently of each other until I'm happy with the results. Here's my image after dragging the black slider to the right to force the darker parts of the brick wall to show through the type, then splitting the slider in two and dragging the left half of the slider back towards the left to smooth out the transition:

I'm going to do the same thing with the bottom white slider to cause some lighter areas of the brick wall photo to show through my text. First, I'll drag the white slider to the left until I'm happy with how much of the wall is showing through:

Then I'll hold down my Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) key to split the white slider in half and drag the right half back towards the right to create another nice transition between the two layers:

And there we go, all done. I've moved both the black and white sliders in towards the center to force some of the brick wall to show through the type, then split the sliders in half to smooth out the transitions between the two layers.

Here's the original image once again with my type above it before I used the Blend If sliders:

And here, thanks to Photoshop's advanced blending options and a few simple moves of the "Blend If" sliders, is my final, much more realistic looking result:

And there we have it!