Photoshop lesson one: lighten a dark photo easily!
I know y’all can look this up yourself. But since I get a lot of requests almost every day from other photographers about photoshop — I thought I’d put together a few quick lessons to show you how easy some of the stuff I do is. It’s not magic — it’s mostly just time and experimenting with things to see what they do. And I read a lot of photoshop books, research on the internet and magazines…
There are a few things though that I do on almost every image — so I’m going to show you how to do those quickly.
First — here’s my crap image (I’m choosing these on purpose so you know that you can improve images. That being said there is NOTHING LIKE HAVING A TECHNICALLY GREAT IMAGE. It makes your processing so much easier and so much more fun. But I’m still learning too — so a lot of my images leave a lot to be desired ::grin::).
See how dark it is? Here’s a QUICK way to lighten it up:
See this image larger by clicking here.
First duplicate the background layer. It’s easy. Just grab onto the background in the palette on the right and drag it over the little square next to the garbage can at the bottom. See it? That makes a copy of whatever you drag and drop into it.
Now you should have two layers. They look exactly the same because you just copied it and one is laying on top of the other one like a slice of cheese on bread. Or…saran wrap over last night’s leftovers…
See where my arrow’s pointing at the word “Screen” at the top? And those two little arrows next to it? That’s the drop down menu for whatever layer is HIGHLIGHTED. See how the top layer ( the one we just created) is blue? That means it is active.
So click on that drop down bar and you’ll see lots of options like normal…multiply…overlay…etc.
Those were such a mystery to me for an embarrassingly long time. But they’re really cool and easy to use. The one we want today is (can you guess?) “screen”. Scroll down and highlight it so that the word screen appears in that little box.
Good job!
Now you should notice the image is considerably brighter.
The other thing you can do — is if it’s too bright — adjust the opacity next to the little bar you just made say screen. Slide it up and down until the image is to your liking.
Once you have it — you can do a number of other things — but usually what I do is merge the two layers together — like spreading peanut butter on one side and jelly on the other side of the sandwich and slapping them into one. That’s what merge does.
And to do that you could go searching for the merge option — but I just do this: Command E (that’s the apple sign key on a mac — or Option E (I think. check) on Windows).
That’s it! Instantly lighter!
And if you want it to be DARKER — do the exact same steps — except choose MULTIPLY as your option instead of SCREEN.
Simple, right?
Thanks! This is so helpful. I just read up on someone’s blog how to use the multiply button on photoshop and it was like opening up a whole new world for me! She suggested to add the gaussian blur filter, then ‘multiply’ and it creates a really neat effect.
Do you merge the files in the end so that it’s a smaller file size?
http://mudspice.wordpress.com
I merge because I want to work on the whole image - so it’s easier to do that on one layer than to try to work between multiple ones. It just depends on what I’m doing to the image. But usually I merge layers before going on to the next steps.
Great tip. I never lighten photos this way
So this is new to me. I’ll give it a try.
I usually use curves to lighten or darken my images.
Yes, I do that too — but this will give you an immediate overall boost to lighten — then tweak with curves or levels.
So why do you do this instead of using curves or levels? I love Photoshop, but it’s a bit of a mystery to me. I know enough to be dangerous and that’s about it. I should read some of those books. It would be fun.
THANKS. LyM needed it written down. I KNOW you showed me, but it didn’t stick in brain.
Always wondered what multiply was good for……
LyM
good tip, Tammy! I don’t usually use the diff blending modes beyond overlay. Will have to use screen more across the board for lightening. Now you need to tell us what you do to get the high-contrast/sharp look…hint, hint.
WOW - that was so easy! Thx ideagirl you saved me lots of hassle