Photo Tutorial by Clare from Borderline

The amazing Clare from Borderline is here today with a wonderful tutorial! And before I let her do the talking I just wanted to thank her for putting this together and tell the rest of you to go and check out her blog(well...after you read the tutorial of course)!

Hello there! I'm not sure how everyone else feels, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who can get bored easily when they settle into routines. Recently while going through my normal photo-editing routine (crop, levels, contrast...etc!) I looked at the photos and decided that I wanted a change from the super-bright colours and harsh blacks without using desaturate, which can often make things look a little dead and highlight unwanted noise!

It's great to change your normal style every now and then and give your photos a fresh look and atmosphere, so here's a quick tutorial to try and achieve that! You'll need any version of Photoshop for this :)

1. Take your image and edit it as normal. In the photo on the left, I haven't altered the colours of Mr Happy Cat at all, he's naturally this luminous orange colour which, although some people may love it, I think is a little harsh.

2. Duplicate the image onto a new layer and set the blending mode of the new layer to "Hard Light". Bring the opacity down to around 40-50%.

3. Create a new blank layer and fill it with a light pastel colour. Pastel lilac is great for warm colours like this (I used #f0c0fa here) but a baby blue works great for photos filled with dark, cool colours.

4. Set the blending mode of the new layer to either "Pin light" or "Hard light". I used "Pin light" here, but "Hard light" looked great too, in a different way. Bring the opacity down to around 50%.

And that's it! This method gives any image a softer look, toning down harsh colours and noise without loosing detail. The atmosphere goes from loud and obvious to dreamy in just a couple of steps. As a bonus, I've found that using this method to edit my photos can actually save a photo that otherwise would be too dark and grainy!

Hope you have fun with this! And thanks for having me here Laura ^.^!