Adjusting color and exposure

- Let's duplicate this layer and put it on top for a second, and we'll choose the Color Adjustment category. Now, generally speaking, I like to use black and white copies a lot. You saw this effect earlier: you can roll this to influence the black and white conversion. In this case, we're gonna bring those reds out a little bit more on the front of the train, and use the contrast and Grain slider to really grit that up, and then refine the brightness.

That's looking pretty good. You can also do things like add a sepia tone and adjust the intensity, and of course, take advantage of standard adjustments like levels and curves. Light and dark can also be useful if you just wanna refine your shadows, or darken your highlights. Other tools call this a shadow-highlights adjustment, and it's a simple adjustment for tweaking things. In this case there, I might also wanna do that on this background layer itself. Let's drop that on, and just pull the shadows up a little bit and darken those highlights down.

Now, with that blurred copy in there, that's looking pretty rich, although a bit strong, so I'll back that off slightly. And there's that sepia tone, but we're not gonna actually use it as a sepia tone. Let's take it and change the blending mode. Remember, with the Move tool selected, Shift + (plus) will step you through your blending modes. In this case, we're just introducing this as a slight hint to the overall image. And I like that right there.

In Soft Light mode, with a slightly lower opacity, that feels pretty good. And remember, you can change the stacking order to slightly influence how those layers interact with each other. That's feeling pretty good there.