Have you ever had a picture that was either over exposed or under exposed? I know I have. I’m the first to admit I still haven’t gotten the hang of having the correct exposure every time I take a picture. Today I’m going to show you a quick way to help improve the exposure after the picture has been taken by using blending modes.

We are going to start by looking at how to darken a slightly over exposed picture. I have this great picture of my kids on our way to California a few years ago. As you can see my daughter’s face is kind of washed out. Sure I could use it as is, but I really wanted to see if I could fix the exposure on it a bit.

I started by first duplicating my picture so I didn’t accidently save over top of the original. Then I made a duplicate layer of my picture (ctrl+J). Making sure my duplicate layer was selected I went to the layers palette and selected Multiply under the blending modes.

This made a darker copy of my picture. This turned the picture a little darker than what I wanted, though.

So I went back up the options in the layers palette and decided to change the opacity a bit.

I set the opacity to 38. Some pictures will be higher and some will be lower. It just depends on how over exposed they are. As you can see this helps put a little bit of the color back into her face.

Now we’ll look at what to do if the picture is a bit under exposed. I have a hard time always getting the exposure right on pictures that I take of someone sitting on our couch. We have a large picture window to one side of it or behind it depending on which end you are sitting. Sometimes it cast just the right amount of light through it but most of the time it is either too dark or too bright. The day I took my youngest daughter’s three month picture it was a bit over cast outside, so her pictures ended up a bit darker than I wanted even with the flash.

So to lighten it up a bit I decided to try the screen blending mode on it. I did the same first 2 steps as the over exposed picture, but this time instead of choosing Multipy I clicked on Screen. This made a lighter copy of my picture.

Again it was a bit too much, so I went up the opacity menu and reduced it to about a 30.

There are other times that leaving the opacity at 100% is desired. For this picture I left it at 100% and also duplicated the blend layer three times.

Layout done using Berry Beauty by Trixie Scraps.

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