Author: Pu

Making use of layer blending can take your iPhone and iPad photography and your post-processing on a higher level, as it enormously widens creative possibilities. However, working with blending modes can be confusing at first and differences between one mode and the next can appear not completely evident.

As a matter of fact, no photo app comes with a truly informative guide to help the newbie in the task of getting started with layer blending. The best idea is to experiment how each mode affects your images, but it can be tough to get the hang of it. For this reason, I am writing a brief overview of the most used blending modes in iPhone photo apps. Most of them you can also find in photo editing programs as Photoshop, some others have slightly different names — but what you can achieve with them is exactly the same. Hopefully, this little guide will help you have a better understanding of what each of the commonest layer blending modes used in today’s photo applications can do.

First, let me explain a few crucial terms used in the layer blending modes descriptions: a Base Layer is the original image you start with; a Blend Layer is the layer placed above the base that needs to be blended with it. To make things easier to understand, I will be grouping modes according to the result they allow to achieve, rather than according to their strictly technical definitions.

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