Contrast Masking.

This is a well known method in the traditional chemical darkroom that is now transferred into the digital darkroom. It's purpose is to bring out details in highlights and shadows..

I stumbled upon a great article at  Outbackphoto.com (the link brings you right to it). In brief it takes you through the different steps of making an overlay layer and a curves layer in Photoshop, which does wonders to your image. I found it so useful, and as I will use it so much, I created an action that does all the work for me. You can download the action here

How it works:

You click on the link which will prompt you to download the file. Download it to your "Photoshop Actions" file. Open Photoshop, go to your "Action tool". Click on the arrow on the top right, and choose "Load action...". Find the file where you placed it, and load it.

Now, open an image, and hit "Play" on the action. It will do all the work for you. It leaves the layers intact, so you can both tweek the overlay layer and the curves layer to your likings.

 

What it does:

It duplicates the original layer, and sets it to "overlay". Then it desaturate this layer, and inverts it. It set's the opacity to 80% and gives it a gaussian blur. Finally it makes an adjustment layer for curves.

 

How it looks:

The "Before" image is an image straight from the camera. It's kind of boring and washed out.

After running the action the colors are stronger and more crisp, and makes the photo pop out more.

I bet you see the difference!

After this, it's up to you if you continue to work on the image, or just resize it and upload it.

 

 

Good Luck!

 

 


Before


After