Setting the Mood

Now, we've all taken pictures, both good and bad. I know that I have had at least one experience where a picture I took was exceptional (see how modest I am), except for one thing: The mood wasn't right.

In this tutorial, I will show you how to change the 'feel' of your picture in very few steps. This will help you achieve professional results without professional skills.

We will start with this image:

First off, grab your picture. This can be something you snapped with a digital camera, or just an image off of google like mine. Next, you'll want to (obviously) open it up in Photoshop. With the layer with the image selected, duplicate it (ctrl+j), and get ready to begin tweaking your photo.

Click on your duplicated layer (it will be the one on top)

With this layer selected, open up the layer effects menu and start scrolling through.

At this point, you can go one of two ways. If you find an effect you really like, stick with it. Remember: If it ain't broke, don't fix it! Since most of these effects are actually quite powerful, you might want to mix effects, or adjust the layers a little. Since this tutorial is meant to show you how to get the most out of the simplest techniques, I will demonstrate the easiest of the two, editing Opacity.

At this point, we have our image:

Click to enlarge

I chose to use the MULTIPLY effect on this image. Quite an improvement from our beginning image to our current one, isn't it? In my opinion, though, this is a bit too strong. Although I like how everything suddenly got much more dramatic, it's just a bit too much to take in.

So now, what we're going to do is, with both layers still in the same order, take the one which has it's effects altered and start tweaking it's opacity little by little:

After lowering my image to 60%, it is much smoother on the eyes, yet still has that dramatic sunset feel to it. Hope you enjoyed this tutorial! Final Result:

Click to enlarge