ABSTRACT
Contrary to popular opinion, what photographers see is not always what they get. Contrast in a scene is often a photographer’s worst enemy. It is a sneak thief that steals away the detail in the highlights or shadows. Wedding photographers will deal with the problem of contrast by using fill flash to lower the subject contrast; commercial photographers diffuse their own light source or use additional fill lighting and check for missing detail using the histogram. In the full version of Photoshop, the user has access to the Advanced Blending options. In this dialog box it is possible to reduce the opacity of the shadow tones on the top layer to reveal the shadow tones beneath. The Advanced Blending options are only available to users of the full version of Photoshop, but the same results can be achieved using a layer style preset loaded into the Presets folder in Elements.
