Photoshop Techniques

I learned a nifty and easy new PS trick to liven up photos recently. Basically, you take your image, duplicate it as a new layer, then apply a gaussian blur to the new layer so that basic shapes are still visible, but the details are blurred. Then change the mode to Overlay, and you wind up softly increasing contrast and saturation - here's a before and after.



Simple, but nice - and very effective on low contrast images.