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Motion Tip: Blend Modes and Pass Through

When working with blend modes in Motion, it’s important to understand how groups of layers interact with each other so that you get the result you are looking for.

Here’s a simple example of three shape layers:

Notice that the blue and green rectangles are in one group called “Top Group”, and the red rectangle is in a separate group below called “Bottom Group”. Notice also that the blue rectangle is selected and that we can see in the HUD that its blend mode is Normal - this is the default.

Rather than using the HUD to identify the blend mode of a selected layer or group, we can view all the blend modes at the same time by using the fly-out menu:

Now we can see that not only do the layers all have the default blend mode of Normal, but the groups have a different default blend mode, called Pass Through. What does it mean?

Let’s change the blend mode of the blue rectangle to Add:

Now the pixel values of the blue rectangle are added to both the green rectangle and the red rectangle to create new colors. Because the Top Group’s blend mode is set to Pass Through, the blend mode of every layer within that group is “passed through” to the layers in groups beneath it.

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