Letting an image edit itself

We confess to being lazy. One of the ways that laziness manifests itself is that we’re always looking for simpler solutions, which in the field of digital imaging can be difficult and occasionally dangerous. But using the contrast, darken, and lighten blend modes to adjust tonality Adobe® Photoshop® is one of those few solutions that is both simple and safe.

Bruce calls this “letting the image edit itself” because rather than having to place curve points and carefully manipulate them, the image content does all the work. If you need more contrast, apply a Soft Light or Hard Light layer. The blending mode takes the contrast that’s already in the image and increases it, with no danger of clipping, and no futzing around in the Curves dialog box. Likewise, when you need to lighten or darken an image, Screen and Multiply do those things proportionally, again with no danger of clipping. Moreover, the blend modes tend to introduce less hue-shifting than major tonal moves with Curves.

Each layer affects all the layers underneath it, so we often end up going back to a previous layer to tweak it to take account of the effect of the ones above it. Using the blend modes, we can simply adjust the layer opacity without having to open dialog boxes, or when we need to make localized changes, we edit the layer masks.

Once you get accustomed to working with the blend modes, you’ll find that they’re useful for many different kinds of edits. But it’s important to remember that the conventional tools still work too!

Requirements

To complete this article, you will need the following software:

Adobe Photoshop CS2

• Try (win)
• Try (mac)
• Buy

Prerequisite knowledge:

Basic knowledge of Adobe Photoshop CS2

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