How to use the Hard Mix blend mode in Adobe Photoshop to relight any image

posted Monday, March 4, 2019 at 7:30 AM EDT

Blake Rudis of f64 Academy is a big fan of the Hard Mix blend mode in Adobe Photoshop. It's one of his favorite blend modes to experiment with despite it having challenging default settings. When you first select the mode, the results look really bad. However, once you understand that the Hard Light blend mode is controlled by fill rather than by opacity, the possibilities start to become apparent.

Before diving into the video tutorial below, you can download Rudis's Photoshop actions by clicking here. What we are going to be doing in this tutorial is using the Hard Mix blend mode to change the lighting in a photo. We will be amplifying the glow and colors in the image while trying to maintain realistic and natural-looking results. To help keep the image looking natural, we will want to have our fill set to between 10 and 20 percent. Further, we can use Blend If to block the brightest and darkest areas of the image, both of which can present challenges do the Hard Mix blend mode. To see how it all works, watch the video below.