This tutorial will teach you a simple technique to enhance the colors of your image making it more vivid and alive. The image is going to be retouched using Layer Blending Modes and a slightly visible Gaussian Blur. After applying the retouch method, your image will look like the example shown below

Start off by opening the image you want to retouch in Photoshop. I used this raw image directly from my camera, you are free to practice this tutorial using if you want to get exactly similar results as the ones shown here.

Once you have the image opened, go through to Image>Adjustments>Curves. The curves window will open, as you can see in the screenshot below, there are two square markers on the field, each marker is created by clicking on a spot on the grid, these marks can even be dragged across the grid. Create two markers in the same position shown below.

After applying the curves, your image will look like this.

Go through Layer>Duplicate Layer, a small window will pop up for you to choose a new name for your duplicated layer, click OK to proceed.

From your Layers Panel, choose the recently duplicated layer and change its Blending Mode into Soft Light.

Your image will now look like the this

Go through Layer>Duplicate Layer once again and this time give the recently duplicated layer a Gaussian Blur by going through Filters>Blur>Gaussian Blur of 10 px.

From the Layers Panel, give the blurred layer an Overlay blending Mode and change its Opacity to 20%.

Your image will now look like the this

Go through Layer>Duplicate Layer one more time and change the recently duplicated layer's Blending Mode into Color Dodge.

Your final image is going to look like the sample below, you can rollover it to see the original raw image for comparison.

This concludes our tutorial, you can check my source PSD here.

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