The bleach bypass process, as it’s used now, is associated with bright, desaturated images with heightened contrast. It works well with distressed or urban subjects, but it can also produce striking portraits too.
It gets its name from the days of color film, where the silver in the film emulsion is washed away (bleached) when the dyes that make up the final color image are formed. If the silver isn’t bleached, you get a color and a black and white image combined. You can simulate this by creating a duplicate, black-and-white version of the image on a new layer and blending it with Multiply mode.
BEFORE: Natural light is all well and good, but artistic edits can recast an image.
AFTER: In Elements you can create a smart bleached bypass effect in very little time.
But there’s a problem. When you do this, you get an image that’s much darker than the original, so much so that it’s very difficult to do anything with it. We’re used to working with positive images, whereas this bleach bypass process was used during negative processes. If you apply it to a negative, it produces a darker, denser image, but since it’s a negative, it’s a much lighter print.
So all we need to do in Photoshop is simulate "negative" processing, and that’s why the walkthrough starts off with what might look like a rather pointless double-reversal process.
Using this technique, you can create a bleach bypass effect that’s both strong and controllable since the color and the black and white "negatives" are on separate layers and have different effects on the image.
Working on the "negative" layers below the Invert adjustment layer can be counter-intuitive, especially once you start messing with color or levels adjustments. If you do want to make other changes to the finished picture’s appearance, you’re better off using new layers above the Invert layer, because these will work perfectly normally.
of 9
