Amateur Photographer Magazine

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So im not the only one up late!....understand hue and sat....but bit baffled by the rest? will have to open up elements, just starting to fiddle around with layers but havent really grasped it yet!!......thank you

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I don't have Elements , but in photoshop there are tons of things you can do with layers. I imagine most are the same in Elements, but will have to wait for somone who knows both to confirm.

One of the usefull things about layers is the bend mode - this is what the new layer does to the old one. In photoshop there is a drop down menu where you can select the blend mode.

So what I have done here is to copy the image to 2 new layers (ctrl A, Ctrl J in photoshop to select all and copy to a new layer). I then set the blend mode of each to a) Multiply and b) Soft Light.

No I have no idea exactly what magic algorithms Adobe are using here, or why they are so mysteriously named but you can see what they do:

Multiply seems to act like an overall darkening of the image, but it also boosts the highlights a bit - It's like adding contrast, but looks subtly different.

Soft Light seems to boost saturation and add contrast in a slightly different way than Multiply in that it does not darken eveything to the same extent.

Once you have set the blend mode you can reduce the opacity of the layer to reduce the effect and get the look you want.

I use a ~25% Opacity Soft Light layer on most images as it seems to give them quite a boost. But be warned if you do this, then mess with curves/levels/dodge/burn/etc each will probably add more and more saturation. So a heavy desaturation at the end is needed to curb that.

Phil

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Phil Winterbourne

http://www.pbase.com/calis

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