Hard Light

I'm more than slightly jealous that Lucy is already enjoying the spring blossoms where she lives.  I live a bit more northerly than her and they are talking about some snow falling tomorrow. *sigh*  But we're here to talk about photo editing, not weather, so let's get to work.

Here are the beautiful blossoms in front of Lucy's local post office:

Last week, The Pioneer Woman showed one of her favorite, yet incredibly simple tools.  Hard light.  AND, you can do it on both Photoshop Elements, as well as Photoshop CS.  You can read her tutorial here.  She's a bit wordy at first, but if you stick with it, she finally cuts to the chase and shows you with lots of step-by-step pictures on  how to do it.  What it all comes down to is creating a new layer and then selecting "Hard Light" in the blending menu in the Layers corner on your screen.  Here's what it looks like on the blossoms:

It just gives a little punch and deepness to the colors.  When you add the feathering around the edging like we talked about a few weeks ago, here's what you get:

Before and After:

Lucy had to do her own editing session on this photo and she shows it on her blog.  It just goes to show you the endless possibilities of photo editing!

Comments

[Joana Leighmoore]

I like how PS simplifies editing with the use of these tools. I use Overlay more though since it creates a balance of the colors. I also mostly use vignette in the lens correction tool to even out the shading.