If you want to add both contrast and a punch of color to your photos Unmesh Dinda of PiXimperfect shows you a technique you might want to try out. In this video, he teaches you how to use Color Burn and Color Dodge blending modes together to quickly boost contrast and color at the same time.

Start by opening your image in Photoshop. Create two Hue/Saturation adjustment layers, which you will set to two different blending modes.

You don’t have to change Hue, Saturation or Lightness, at least for now. Just set one layer to Color Burn and the other to Color Dodge blending modes. You’ll get a funky-looking image, but you need to decrease the Fill of both layers until you end up with just a hint of contrast and color.

When you’ve set the blending modes and decreased the fill of the layers, you can also play with Hue, Saturation, and Brightness to change the look of the image further. It takes literally a few minutes to apply these changes, so I made a couple of examples to show you what it looks like:

Image before applying Color Dodge and Color Burn Layers Image after applying Color Dodge and Color Burn Layers

On this before/after example, you can appreciate how the colors are more rich after applying two hue saturation layers, the first one of them with Color Burn overlay (10% Fill) and the second with a Color Dodge overlay (10% Fill).

Make sure to watch the video for more examples, and if you want to learn more about Photoshop’s blending modes, on this link you’ll find a great in-depth explanation.

Have you tried this technique before? I’d like to see your before & after results in the comments section below, please share !

[Create Colorful Contrast with 2 Special Blend Modes! | PiXimperfect | DIYPhotography.net]