Part Two of Blend Modes focuses more on creative effects. The first effect is one I learned of on Russell Brown's excellent podcast and shows ways to paint with Blend Modes through the History brush and offers extremely flexible ways to change the tone, contrast and color of your image in a very intuitive way without layers. Next we explore hand coloring or rather mouse coloring to take an old photo and add color to it before it is added to an image composite. Finally we explore figure and background blending through use of the new Darker Color Blend mode in CS3 and the use of the blending sliders. There are many blend modes still to cover and no doubt there will be a Part Three. Stay tuned.

In this episode I want to go in a slightly different direction. Rather than another how-to tutorial I want to present my work from a more creative perspective, how I evolved as an artist and a Photoshop practitioner. So we will look back at early work that predated my Photoshop involvement as well as the evolution of the imagery as I began working digitally. I hope this gives you a perspective on the role that Photoshop as a software program plays in my thought process as I work through the building of various images. I also hope in the future to feature other Photoshop artists and explore their working methodology and how Photoshop influences their working process and relationships with their images. My goal is to provide a balance between technique and the thought process that creates the final images.