Contrast and Colour
There is a little understood component in working with digital images that involves blending between layers.
Blending dictates, essentially, how one layer interacts with or affects another layer (below it). Photoshop and its many little ugly cousins provide us with a miriad of possibilities from blending brightness to contrast to colours to plain weirdness. You probably won’t ever need more than about 5 of the basic blending modes but the one that I find the most useful is the “Luminosity” blending mode.
When increasing contrast in an image, whether you use Levels, Curves or any other contrast enhancing tool, it is important to note that it affects contrast across all of your colour channels. This can be easily remedied by simply changing your contrast enhancing layer or adjustment layer [1] to use a Luminosity blending mode.
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