SilvrWolf

For someone just learning PS I think getting the grasp of BLENDS is really really important. The difficult part is remembering what each one will do. I know it is very easy to just click the Blend style (in PS7) and down arrow through all of them. But I was wondering is there a Filter or Plugi-in (Action?) that will give you a preview of all or some of the Filter Blends on the same page. I have an action that I can;t recall where I picked it up but it will quarter my canvas and give me 4 views of my image in different color overlays. Just a thought.

Erik

Make a page yourself, and do use black and white, medium grey and a greyscale gradient.
The main problem is that every channel if affected depending on its value, so the result in RGB is always unpredictable.

say you have a pixel (23,147,43) above a pixel (43,68,128). When you apply an algorhythm/blend mode that adds both values when darker than medium grey, and subtracts both values when they're lighter, the resulting pixel will be (20,215,85). You see that the result is not what you would expect when you didn't calculate it. And who does???

If I remember correctly, we did do some threads on blend modes in the beginning of the qt and tech forum.

theKeeper

I agree with Erik...

...but at the same time, i'd also like to add a confirmation that over time, and with more experience using PS, you'll learn to remember/predict what type of effect each Blend Mode will produce on your given image.

This is something that just takes a lot of doing... which equals out to mean a lot of time spent.