Blending Modes

There were a couple of comments about "soft light" blending.

Briefly - all the "blending modes" are useful - depending on what look you are trying to achieve. After you've made a dupe layer, change the blend mode to "soft light." What this does is make the blacks richer (darker) and the light areas lighter.

Adjust the opacity of the blend to taste.

Add a curve or level layer as needed.

There are a million ways to skin a cat (sorry Buddy) in Photoshop. Perhaps a carefully tweaked curve can achieve the same look - I don't know.

Sometimes I might use several layers blended together. Depends on what I'm starting from and where I'm going with the image.

The reason I even mention the "soft light" layer is that it seems especially useful with scanned negatives. Almost every print that began life as a black and white negative - gets a soft-light treatment - at least to begin with.

Sometimes I use it for special effects. The shot of the carriage horse below - it is actually three captures sandwiched together and blended (yes - shot on a tripod).

The only caveat - I would - as usual - do sharpening etc. before you start doing your layers and as always at the correct image size for printing.

And you can get trickier. You can copy out a piece of the sky and blended it back with whatever blending mode you need. You can even blend your "curve" adjustment layer... On and on it goes.

Reference: Adobe Photoshop for Photographers, Marin Evening (Chapter on Montage Techniques).

I've been loathe to write much about Photoshop techniques because there is already so much information out there and I tell you - I am no expert. Also, I know there are a lot of readers that just skip this stuff hoping I'll write something funny or put up an exceptional photograph. One thing I notice is that Blogger lets you manage more than one blog; so what I might do is just create a separate space for the technical stuff.

ONE OTHER TECH NOTE:

The Blogger / Google search bar wasn't working. It wasn't generating the correct URL for the search. I wrote Blogger about it and they told me there wasn't anything they could do about it. That the problem was with the Google search. The truth was, whoever was responsible for generating the search code from Blogger made a mistake.

The "forward" slash between the website and the blog directory was missing. Their widget wasn't putting it in. I ended up doing a kludge for this by letting them generate the code, then taking that code and fixing it, and placing it in the blog template and then removing their search widget. Works okay now.

I checked a few other sites that were hosted via FTP as opposed to Blogspot and the FTP sites were having the same problem so it is pretty widespread.