Blend modes work great between layers but can I blend to the canvas?
For example, take this image:
It has an orange square on the left and transparent canvas on the right. I then placed a black-to-white gradient in the middle and set it to the multiply blend mode. On the left (over the orange) we can see the gradient essentially fading from fully opaque black to fully transparent, but on the right (over the canvas) we see no change in opacity or blending, it's still the plain black-to-white gradient.
Is there a way to make the right side blend with the canvas so that it's fully opaque black at the top and fully transparent at the bottom?
I know that I could use the gradient tool to solve the issue for this simple example, but often I have more complex artwork to deal with and having the ability to make blacks solid and whites transparent over the canvas would be fantastic! I think of this as blending to the canvas but perhaps there's another name or tool for this?
Fireworks had a filter called convert to alpha which would get the result I'm after. It would convert your later to gresycale, then anything black would become 100% opaque, anything white became 0% opaque, and all shades of grey would fall somewehere inbetween. I'm looking for an eiquivelant feature in Photoshop!
