Enhancing Contrast and Colors with the Overlay Blending Mode and Eraser Tool

In this Photoshop tutorial I am going to describe a technique that allows you to enhance the contrast and deepen the colors of an image with extreme level values without over- or underexposing any areas. For this purpose, we're going to use the blending mode "overlay" and the eraser tool.



Above is my original picture. As you can see, the sun is bright while the tree areas are rather dark. If you tried to adjust the levels for the whole picture at once you'd probably just increase these extremes, causing the bright areas to be overexposed. Here's how you can avoid that:

1. First, open the picture in Photoshop and duplicate its layer by right-clicking on the background layer in the layers window (F7) and on "Duplicate Layer...".

2. In the layers window, click on the duplicated layer (default name: "Background copy"). Now the drop-down menu on top of the layers window becomes clickable. Click on it and select the "Overlay" blending mode. My picture now looks like this:



3. Next, select the elliptical marquee tool (press M or select it from the toolbar) and enter a value in the "Feather" field in the top toolbar that's high enough to ensure a seamless color flow. For this example image (800px wide) I used the feather value 100. Larger images require higher values.

4. The next step is a trial and error procedure. First, make sure your "Background copy" layer is still selected. Then, using the marquee tool, I selected parts of the sky where I wanted to enhance its contrast and had Photoshop auto-adjust the levels (Image > Adjustments > Levels > Auto). Now my picture looks like this:



5. I did the same thing with the ground area to increase its contrast, making the picture look like this:



6. Now, in order to brighten up the areas that are too dark, I used the eraser tool (E) and erased the dark areas from the "Background copy" layer, mainly trees and dark spots on the ground. I also erased some areas around the sun which were overexposed by the overlay mode.

Make sure the eraser tool's hardness (similar to the feather value) and size are adequate. In order to change these values, simply right-click on the image after selecting the eraser tool. Additionally, reduce the "flow" value for the eraser tool in the top toolbar.

Now my picture looks like this:



7. Finally, in order to reduce the noise in the sky and to enhance the details I applied the Noise Ninja plug-in. And there you go:




Here are some other images I processed using this technique: