Improve your Digital Photo in 1 Second

I take a lot of digital photos, but I'm not professional photographer, and my photos often need improving. The most common problem for me is that a photo is too light. There are probably advanced techniques of configuring photo camera and adjusting the photo in Photoshop, but I don't really have time to study them. So I found an easy trick to make such photos better very fast. Lets take a photo shown on the right. It need to be a bit darker. You can adjust its levels (Ctrl-L) or simply apply Auto levels (Ctrl-Shift-L), but it doesn't always produces good results.

Here is my trick: * duplicate layer with photo * set blend mode of the new layer to multiply * adjust layer opacity (usually 50% is enough). I have setup shortcuts for all 3 actions, so it really takes less than a second to apply! And the result usually has richer colors than it would have after levels adjusting.

... just another example...