Saving an Overexposed Photo
Monday, September 21st, 2009Hi everyone! Jeni here with a quick and easy photo tip. I don’t know about you but I often end up with a few photos that are overexposed. Here is a super quick and easy way to save those photos!
First, here’s my straight out of the camera shot –
This is a picture of my daughter when she was about 4 at my sister’s wedding. I love her bright smile, but you can see how her face is blown out a little. It was a very bright sunshiny day! So here’s what we’ll do to fix it up. (I’m using PSCS3 but these directions should work in any PS version and Elements. I’m sure you can adapt it to most other programs as well.) First, do your basic editing of the photo like removing noise or defogging (Unsharp mask filter set to Amount – 20%; Radius – 60 pixels; Threshold – 0. I do this for every photo!)
Next, make a duplicate layer of your photo by dragging your first layer to the little square in your layers palette that says "Create a new layer." Now change the new layer’s blending mode to "Multiply." Voila!! My photo is much better now. You can repeat these steps if you need some more fixing. I actually knocked the opacity down to about 80% on my "Multiply" layer because I thought it was a bit much. Here’s my after photo:
See how easy this technique is? An quick too, so give it a try!
