Have impossible pictures that you might as well throw away? They can be saved. Not all of them will be top quality, but if they're the picture of a lifetime, they are well worth saving, if only for your own enjoyment.

So how do we work this miracle? It's not as difficult as you might think. Open your original image and make a duplicate of it. We'll be working on the duplicate so you can close the original as soon as you have a copy of it.

First we need to put a copy of the image into the clipboard for later use, so with the image active press CTRL C on your keyboard. Then we need to lighten up the image. There are several ways to do this: adjust the Brightness/Contrast, adjust the Hue/Saturation/Luminance, Gamma Correction. Each method has it's own place and time. I chose to adjust the Gamma Correction for this image as the other methods resulted in a splotchy effect in the final product.

You may have to play around with the sliders here, depending on how dark your original image is. Mine was so bad that I adjusted the gamma all the way up to 5.00 on all three sliders.

Time to put that image sitting in the clipboard to use. Press CTRL L on your keyboard to paste the copy into your image as a new layer. At this point the image will appear as it did before you made the gamma adjustmet. Not to worry, it's going to get worse before it gets better.

In the Layer Control Palette, select a Blend Mode of Burn for layer one. Your image is now darker than the original.

To adjust the darkness back out of the image, move the slider for Layer 1 to the left. Again, you'll need to play with the slider to get the right balance for your image. I adjusted the opacity level to 54 for my image.

Try different blend modes for different effects.
Overlay	Soft Lite