Mastering Blending Modes in Photoshop Elements is, I believe, one of the keys to using PSE to its full potential.  Unfortunately, I haven’t done that yet.

Here’s what I have learned.  If you have in the same file two layers, one of which is a copy of the other, changing the blending of the top layer can give you some helpful results.

Try it for yourself:  Duplicate the background layer of an image and place it as a new layer in the same file.  The default blending mode will be Normal and you will see no changes.  Go to the Blending Modes drop down menu in the Layers Palette and change the blending mode to Dissolve.  Don’t click anywhere else with your mouse.  You probably won’t see any difference in your image, but now you can use your down arrow key to scroll through all the blending modes and play with how they work.

Practical Application for Using Blending Modes in PSE

Lighting in my photos is rarely perfect.  The pictures turn out either underexposed (too dark) or overexposed (too light).  And there are lots of things you can do in Photoshop to improve these issues.  But, here are quick, 3 step, less than 30 second fixes for either condition that do quite a good job!  Thanks to Scott Kelby and his book Photoshop Elements 6 Book for Digital Photographers, where I first read about this trick.

Tutorial to Lighten Underexposed Photos in Photoshop Elements

• With the image that you want to correct open, right click on the background layer and select Duplicate Layer (then hit OK in the resulting dialogue box).
• With the new layer active (highlighted), change the blending mode to Screen.  The Blending Mode drop-down menu is the first item in the top left hand corner of the Layers Palette.
• Reduce the opacity of this new layer until the picture’s exposure looks good to you.  (The opacity adjustment can be found in the top right hand corner of the layers palette.)  That’s it!

Here is a before and after to illustrate:

Underexposed Picture

Underexposed Picture Corrected Using Photoshop Elements

Super Big Sister’s face looks much brighter in the corrected shot!  And in the final version, I used a layer mask to apply to lightening only to the people, so that the sky retained the beautiful sunset colors.  Post a comment if you need help with that!

Tutorial to Darken Overexposed Photos in Photoshop Elements

• With the image that you want to correct open, right click on the background layer and select Duplicate Layer (then hit OK in the resulting dialogue box).
• With the new layer active (highlighted), change the blending mode to Multiply.
• Reduce the opacity of this new layer until the picture’s exposure looks good to you.

Overexposed Picture

Overexposed Picture Corrected Using Photoshop Elements

It’s far from being a perfect pic even with this cool trick, but it’s a huge improvement , right?

Like I said, there are probably better ways to fix these lighting issues in Photoshop Elements, but these are foolproof and easy!  Enjoy!