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Blending layers using Blend Ranges in Paint Shop Pro.
By Doofi
There are several ways to control a layer's opacity. The simplest would probably be the destructive Eras0r-Technique. Forget that one. A better way would be creating a Mask Layer to gain full control over the opacity without losing image information. But it can be a pain in the ass to paint or select the mask sometimes. Blend Ranges is most likely the fastest way to get rid of unwanted pixels. It doesn't work in every situation, but it can save you some boring work once in a while.
Blahblah, here comes the interesting stuff:
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Blend Ranges basically lets you blend a layer according to it's own's channel's intensity, it's lightness, and the same values of the layer below.
For example look at this mossy texture (#10001 on cgtextures.com). Let's say you want to get rid of the wall and apply the moss to another texture. With Blend Ranges you can take advantage of the lighness-difference between the wall and the moss and smoothly blend out the wall.
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Despite being very useful, this tool is carefully-guarded secret. I for one found it very, very late in my PSP career and I've never seen any tutorial on it. But it's a sleeper of a tool.
Anyways, it's in the Layer Properties. Double-click on the layer in the layers palette and open the Blend Ranges tab.
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What you will find is one drop-down menu for selecting the channels and two bars that display the ranges you input from. Each has a range of 256 values from 0 to 255and four markers. The markers at the top indicate full opacity, the values of the markers at the bottom will be invisible. By the way this has been solved much nicer than in Photoshop, where you have all four markers on the same height which is confusing. Pwnd. For the moss example I only used the grey channel, because dealing with all three channels can get really complex, as colours always consist of all three channels, but have only one brightness.
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These are my values, which I found out by trial and error. You can see that the top marker is set positioned 100 and the one below at 185. That means, every pixel that is darker than 100 (on a scale of 0 to 255! NOT 100%) will be fully opaque and everything brighter than 185 will be invisible resp. the layers below will be visible. The cursor points at the middle of the two, 142, where the opacity is at 50%, or rather 127. Everything in between fades. I recommend to switch auto proof on, so you can check your results instantaneously, cause this is a trial and error thing. Click the button that shows an eye wit a lock.
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Looks good, eh? The light areas with brightness-values greater than 100 subtly blend out and you can effectively put everything underneath it that comes along. If you're not too happy with the results, you can enhance the effect by increasing the contrast of the layer.
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My result looks like this. No harm done to any pixels and you can still apply blend modes, masks or whatever. But be careful: If you change the layer, the opacity will be changed too, as it always adjusts itself automatically according to the brightness. If you're satisfied with the visibility and want to make it definite, you can just merge the layer down onto a new, empty layer. The concrete texture is #6613, by the way.
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Yeeees, I know what you're thinking! You're all like OMFG, I wanted to include this super cool vent thing (#4534), but it looks like crap, because the moss grew all over the holes. That's not logical, Captain!«, no? (sorry, I couldn't come up with a better example :B) Then you should check out the uber-pwnage-underlyinglayer-blend-range-bar (upullbrb)! Unleash the total opacity control of the all-powerful underlying layer! Consistent with what I wrote before about the currentlayer-bar, the underlying-layer-bar does exactly the same, but with the brightness-values of the layers below.
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Don't let the name »Underlying layer« fool you! Of course, this bar works with all layers underneath the current one with the moss. In this example I used the values 63 and 113. As you can probably already tell, if pixels on the underlying layers are darker than 63, the moss-layer's corresponding pixel will be invisible. Between 63 and 113 the moss layer fades in and everything brighter will result in full mossopacity. Evidently only in accordance to the this-layerbar.
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Yeah, it looks shitty, I know. But you get the point...
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Okay, now let's get to the negative aspect of blend ranges:
It doesn't work with adjustment-layers (at least in PSPX). There are workarounds, though. Since adjustment-layers actually only consist of 256 greys you can create a mask from a layer with blend ranges and just paste it onto the adjustment layer. Cool, eh? Two or three clicks more than in Photoshop. :(
Doofi
Copyright 2007 Doofi
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