Color Exploration: Change colors in Procreate using blending modes

Video Transcript

Hey there, my name is Valerie Englehart and I am a surface pattern designer. Today I want to show how to easily change colors on a raster image using blending modes in Procreate. The reasoning for this is if you have a pattern that has like a lot of colors and textures on it, sometimes going and changing each individual color takes forever and this is just a fun way to have some unexpected results, play with blending modes, and try out some different colors.

So I'm gonna take my pencil. I already have a flattened image of my pattern block and as you can see I picked one with a variety of colors so we can get some interesting results. I'm going to go into my layers menu, add a new layer and I'm just gonna fill that layer with a color. Let's do, ooh, I like green. So now I have this solid green block. I'm going to go into my layers. I'm gonna tap this letter N to change my blending modes.

So here's what it looks like for multiply and I'm just gonna scroll down and see if I like any of these. This is a great thing to just when you are just sitting down and you're feeling a little creative but maybe you don't have a lot of time or—oh that's unexpected—but it's mostly just a fun little exploration idea. Oh I like this.

So if I turn off the layer I can see this very colorful pattern block and when I turn it back on using hue, it created these lovely shades of teal and I really like that. I wasn't expecting that. Now we do have a couple more blending modes so let's see saturation. Color looks pretty similar but more blue. There's luminosity. So I like hue. I'm gonna keep that.

So I'm going to add a new layer and I'm gonna turn this off. I can come back to it later and just export as a JPEG or a PNG file. So let's play with one more color. Let's go opposite. Let's pick a bright red. Fill that new layer. Now it's just a block of color. Tap the N and play with the blending mode. Oh that looks pretty nice. So overlay makes it much warmer and I like this variation. I'm getting over here where there was kind of that teal leaf. Now it's a little more beachy. I like that.

Let's see. So that was overlay. Soft light, hard light. Ooh subtract looks really nice too. Kind of makes me think of like an underwater vibe. Oh color is nice too. So overlay is my favorite but if I really liked overlay but I also liked some of the other ones all I have to do is I can duplicate the layer or I could have just added a layer and made another block of color. I'm gonna turn off that overlay layer that I like. Now this new layer is still an overlay because I just duplicated the layer and I'm gonna bring it back down to subtract. And so now all I have to do is tap on the wrench, share and I'll do it as a JPEG and I'll just save the image and then I can do it again. Turn off my subtract layer. I'll turn on the overlay one, wrench, share, JPEG and save.

And so you can spend so much time just playing around with different color options and it's a great way to expand out a pattern that's doing very well but perhaps you want to see what it's like in blues or greens or pinks. And if you have something that has a lot of colors this is a fun way to change those colors without having to do a lot of manual labor in your layers. So I hope that was helpful. Let me know if there's anything else you'd like to see and well have fun. Bye!