The Enthusiast's Guide to Night and Low-Light Photography, 1st Edition

50. A QUICK CONTRAST TRICK USING BLEND MODE

FOR THE FINAL tip in this book, I am going to share a Photoshop trick that I learned years ago and still use to this day because it’s easy, fast, and can really add some pop to your images.

This technique relies on the Luminosity Blend Mode, which blends the lightness values in an image but doesn’t affect the color. This allows you to adjust the contrast without messing up the color of your image. I like to make a new layer with a high-contrast black-and-white version of the image, and then blend using the Luminosity Blend Mode. This makes the dark parts darker and the light parts lighter. Since I can ...