I hate the autoflash on my digital camera. It never fails; I’ve spent a whole bunch of time framing a shot and getting the focus just right, concentrating on holding the camera steady because I forgot my tripod, well, you know the drill. So i take the shot and UP POPS THE FLASH AND DROWNS EVERYTHING IN A BLAZE OF WHITE! I’ve gotten to the point where I deliberately go out of my way to choose modes where I know it CANNOT come up and ruin my shot. But that does not do anything to save those images that I have already taken and had ruined by the stupid flash.

How about if I share something that does? (I originally learned this trick while reading the excellent book ‘the photoshop book for digital photographers’ by Scott Kelby (ISBN 0-7357-1236-0). If you find the following useful, you should seriously consider picking up a copy as there is much that it can teach you 🙂

Now, mind you, it’s not just my stupid flash that I hate for overexposing my pictures. I’m frequently mad at the sun for making things so darned bright. And at the sky for projecting light rather than reflecting it, and thus fooling my poor, simple light meter. Oops, I’m in danger of ranting, aren’t I?

Anyway, here’s how the trick works:

1. Use Photoshop to open an image in which you wish the flash had not fired (or in which the sun was being somewhat over effusive)
2. Duplicate the background layer (Control-J on PC or Command-J on Mac)
3. Set the blending mode for the new layer to Multiply
   
   • Make sure your new layer is selected in the layers palette (click it).
   • Find the blending mode dropdown list at the top-left corner of the layers palette (it’s the one whose current choice reads Normal.
   • Choose Multiply from the list.

Notice the difference? Pretty cool, isn’t it? It’s as if Photoshop magically reached back in time and turned the flash back off 🙂

Here’s what the Photoshop help says about the Multiply layer blending mode and what it does:

Multiply looks at the color information in each channel and multiplies the base color by the blend color. The result color is always a darker color. Multiplying any color with black produces black. Multiplying any color with white leaves the color unchanged. … The effect is similar to drawing on the image with multiple magic markers.

Here’s what I say about it:

It should be called the miraculous way to fix that stupid flash in my camera 😉

TIP: If one multiply layer does not quite fix the overflash, feel free to add another one. And another one…

TIP 2: If you reach a point where the photo’s not quite right yet, but adding another multiply layer darkens the photo too much, try changing the opacity of the final layer to 50% (you can do this by changing the value of the Opacity dropdown which is right next to the Blending Mode dropdown in the Layers palette)