I bet that some of you smart ladies know this awesome and quick trick for correcting poorly-exposed photos already!  And yes, I know the flowers are wilting and dying.  I get really bored with perfect flower pictures all the time, don’t you?

The flower image above started out overexposed, as you can see here:

A bit washed out, don’t you think?

To fix it, I opened the image in Photoshop Elements and duplicated the background layer.  I changed the Blend Mode to Multiply, then reduced the layer’s opacity, just a bit.  For severely overexposed shots, duplicate the new layer as many times as needed to fix the exposure.

That’s it!  (Of course, I added a vignette and sharpened just to polish the final image.)

Change the Blend Mode to Screen, and you can fix an underexposed picture like the one below.

Before – way too dark:

After, with a little sharpening and a vignette - just right: