Brighten an Image in Photoshop

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There are many different techniques that can be used to brighten an image. The following tutorial teaches one method using layers and blending options.

For this tutorial, I will demonstrate with the following image taken from Broken Fall’s stock images.

First, locate the layers window on your screen, which should be located on the right side. If you can’t find it, you can press F7 to make it appear (and again to disappear, or vice versa).

Once you have found the layers window, right click (or left click on a left-handed mouse), select “duplicate layer”, and press “okay” when prompted. This will create a copy of your image in a new layer on top of the first one.

With the new layer still highlighted in the layers window, change the blending options to overlay.

Duplicate the layer you just changed to overlay twice. Each of these two new layers will have the same settings as the original; in other words, they will also have their blending options set to overlay. You can adjust this number of duplicated layers as much as you want for your personal preference and based on the image you are using.

Create a new layer on top of the previous four (the original image and three overlaid copies) by clicking the new layer icon at the bottom of the layers window while the top layer is highlighted.

Press G on your keyboard to select the paint bucket tool, and fill the new layer with white. Then, change the blending options of this white layer to soft light. You can play around with the opacity of this if you’d like, but I kept mine at 100%.

That’s all! Here’s the original image followed by my brightened version.

Now doesn’t that look sunnier? Good luck, and feel free to contact me with any questions regarding this tutorial.