Technique Tuesday - Lightening a photo the Easy Way

Lightening a Photo the Easy Way

For Photoshop v7 +

You can download a pdf of this tutorial here

This is a very simple way to lighten all or part of a photo which is a bit dark

Open your photo in Photoshop and duplicate your background layer

Change the blend mode of the top layer to screen

If you find the result is too light then adjust the opacity of the top layer.

If you only want part of your image lighter then apply a layer mask  by clicking on the mask icon and painting in black on the layer mask

Here in this example – applying the screen blend mode on the top layer makes the photo really too light

So I applied a mask and inverted the mask ( Cntrl I)- and painted back in the areas I want to make lighter

I hope you found this simple tip useful. It really can be a time saver.