so photoshop has had real color blending this whole time

[rtil]

all this time i've been painting in photoshop and dealing with the fact that it does not blend colors properly, that is to say that if you are to mix a color like yellow and blue you get a muddy middle value instead of a purple hue you should be getting - same goes with any other mix of colors in the spectrum.

well it turns out this whole time photoshop does indeed have additive blending and it's been right under my nose. if you are painting and you go to image > mode > lab color, start painting and you will find your colors blend a lot more naturally.

i saw an example on facebook, but i have a better one i think. here you can clearly see the differences side by side:


on the one hand i'm really happy i know this now. on the other i'm upset that it took me this long to find out

enjoy

[Tardigrade]

Oh, neat. I wasn't aware of this either, so I'll try this out next time I do some digital painting in Photoshop. Thank you for sharing this.

[rtil]

another thing to note - this also works with layers. so if you put a blue wash layer on top of a yellow layer, you will get the same purple blending as if you were mixing the colors on the same layer. kind of obvious but i wasn't sure if it would behave exactly the same. it does

[iinnkk]

Sev said i needed to come back onto tba to view this thread and i thank the art gods that i did
i had to log in just to say that this will change my life yay

[rtil]

enjoy~

[Greenkitten]

Now if only I could paint.

[valiums]

omg

[zwimmy]

cool story bro

[rtil]

cool story bro

[fish]

aw shit

[rtil]

there are two downsides to LAB color i have noticed after painting a finished piece in it. they are minor, but worth sharing.

some brush and layer modes are disabled. the greyed out ones cannot be used:


when saving, only PSD, EPS, JPF (jpeg2000) and TIFF are available. the image must be converted back to RGB or CMYK to save in to other formats. this, unfortunately, reduces the gamut and can wash out some colors. the best way to go about this is to flatten the image and then change the color mode in the color profile of Adobe RGB. however, i have noticed that some browsers or websites show images in LAB because they are much more vivid than they normally would be. so, sometimes, this isn't as big of a deal. really, the best benefit to LAB in my opinion is the blending while painting.