If you’ve ever underexposed photos like I have and don’t want to fool with PhotoShop’s Curves & Levels, this trick may be for you. Open your photo in PS. Hit Control-J (Mac Command-J) to duplicate the layer. Click the window shade on the top left of the Layers Palette and switch from Normal to Screen. Voila! Your image lightens without artifacts! Still too dark? Click Control-J again. If the image is too light, just click on Opacity on the Layers Palette to bring up the slider and slide to the left until it looks right. When everything looks good, flatten the image to collapse the layers to perform color corrections, etc.

I took an image from this post and did the trick. (Hope you don't mind fj0...)https://www.northamericanmotoring.co...ad.php?t=56394

Note the headlight rims on the corrected image are not blown out and also note the lack of significant artifacts that would be present from adjusting brightness conventionally.

Original:


Corrected by the above technique:

Hope this helps someone who's new to PhotoShop!

 

Very nice. Thank you.

 

You can also darken a light image by changing a duplicate layer from Normal to Multiply. Don't get me started on Layer Masks...

 

Nice tip! Works wonders on some of the messed up photos I have!

 

Also look into Levels/Curves and Shadow/Highlight.

A very handy tool is Selective color as well.

 

Thanks for reply, fj0...awesome MINI. Hope you don't mind that I used your photo.

 

Oh no its all good.