Well, it happens very often that you take some cool photographs and they look cool in your camera display and when you’re back home and look at them on your screen, they’re pretty flat and not so vibrant. In the next steps I’ll show you how you can spice up such an image.

The work mentioned below can be done with any image editing software which supports layer techniques and layer blending modes. Adobe Photoshop is my choice but you can do this with Gimp or PaintShop Pro as well. Please keep in mind that in Gimp or PaintShop Pro the blending modes have different names. Please consult your manual or grab the internet for appropriate instructions.

Note: click on the thumbnails to get full size images (lightbox)

OK, let’s start.

1. We load our basic image

2. After duplicating the layer, we do a brightness/contrast adjustment. In this case I took the contrast +30 and added +10 brightness, so the image is not too dark.

3. Now we duplicate the adjusted layer and desaturate it with ctrl+shift+u.

After that, we set the blending mode to overlay and set the opacity to 50%

4. Well, we normally could finish here but let’s tweak the image a bit more. We add a new layer, set the blending mode to overlay and use a big soft brush with 20% opacity and paint with black color the edges, in fact we paint a slight vignette to focus the main subject. As the result, the waterdrops are now more accentuated.

5. The color friends stop here and the B&W friends follow me with the next steps. We add a gradient layer and choose the black/white gradient.

6. After that we add another layer. This time we choose the levels layer and adjust the mids and blacks to boost the overall contrast.

Now your image is ready for print. If you intend to publish online, then flatten the image, assign the sRGB color profile, resize for web, sharpen and you’re done.

A working file with all the steps above is attached as a zipped layered tiff.

Have fun processing. Feedback is very much appreciated. :)

Cheers, Vernon Trent

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