Blend mode boosters

James Paterson shares his tricks to enhance your image’s tones and colours with layer blend modes in Affinity Photo

- James Paterson

THE MISSION

Use blend modes and painting tricks to boost skies, trees and buildings in Affinity Photo

Time needed 20 minutes

Skill level Beginner

Kit needed Affinity Photo

Landscapes will often benefit from local adjustments to pull out detail, enhance colours or reveal textures in specific parts of the scene. One way this can be achieved is with layer blend modes. These are often thought of as a means to combine two or more images into one, but blend modes can also be hugely useful for enhancing colours and tones. In this project we’ll look at how to use blend modes in combination with other tools and adjustments to enhance the famous landscape of Meteora in Greece. We’ll break the scene down into different areas – trees, sky, buildings, rocks – and apply tailored edits to each. Whatever landscape you choose to edit, it can usually be divided up in a similar way.

Two of the most useful blend modes for this effect are Overlay and Soft Light. By painting colours on a layer set to the Soft Light mode we can enhance and enrich the existing colours in the scene. We can also paint in extra punch using the Overlay blend mode, and add drama to the sky. The Linear Light mode is another useful one for boosting colours. We’ve used it here to lift the reds in the roof of the monastery, which helps to draw the eye towards the subject and contrasts with the surrounding greens and greys. Finally, the Multiply blend mode is handy for darkening down overly bright areas, so we can use it here to balance out the bright sky with the land below.