Whether you're celebrating the Fourth of July, or on a summer trip to a theme park
fireworks are sure to light up the night sky.
you'll want to snap photos, but if you're not careful they may not turn out
quite as vibrant as you remembered.
In this tutorial, I'm going to light up some fireworks photos with depth and color
by blending multiple layers.
Your family and friends will be blown away.
Now if you've used layers in PaintShop Pro before,
you'll already be familiar with how to add and manipulate images in this Layers Palette.
If not, check out the tutorial in the link below.
Just a quick refresher: if you don't see this palette,
launch it by clicking the F8 key on your keyboard.
Once you see this layers palette, we're ready to add a whole new color dimension
to our fireworks photos.
Firework photos are dynamic, but if you've shot fireworks from the ground
you simply don't have the time to do anything fancy.
Usually I would use the HDR feature on the camera if I wanted to make my photos pop,
but fireworks change in a fraction of a second, and that's just not enough time to use this feature.
So what I'm going to do instead of creating an HDR image by combining
the best attributes of multiple exposures,
is use one photo with added layers.
Each layer will add depth and color, and we'll merge them into one spectacular result.
So let's get started! We want to make our fireworks pop.
The first thing you're going to need to do
is get open the original image that you took at the fireworks display.
Next, what I'm going to do is go to my layers palette here,
right click on the background, and select duplicate.
rename this layer to multiply, and I'll set the blend mode to
well, you guessed it, Multiply.
Naming your layers isn't necessary, but it does help keep things organized.
Next, I'm going to quickly duplicate the background again,
drag it to the top of the layers, and I'll call this one Vibrant Blur.
The vibrant in the name explains it for this layer.
You'll want to really increase the photo's color and vibrancy.
So go to the Adjust menu, and use Hue Saturation or Vibrancy,
from the Hue/Saturation menu.
you don't need to be shy, I'm going to use both to give this a real burst of color.
Now I'll go to Adjust, Blur, and Gaussian Blur.
The amount of blur needed is really going to depend on the size of the photo,
So there's no real right or wrong number here.
Just drag the slider until the image looks about like this.
So now we have an additional two layers on top of our background. Why not three?
I'll duplicate one more copy of the background,
name this one Soft Light,
and drag it to the very top of the layers palette.
i'm going to soften the differences between the three layers with this blend mode called Soft Light,
To really show off that amazing contrast of light against the black background.
And if you find that the image is a little too blurry,
you can always go back to that layer
and change the opacity.
Do this by dragging the gauge over to the left.
and in this case, it looks like seventy-five percent is about the magic number.
When you have the image the way that you would like it, you can right click on any one of these layers
and select Merge, and then Merge All Flattened.
Now that the images are combined into a single layer, you can save the image in jpg format.
And it's just that easy to make your firework photos pop.