Correct The Exposure: Multiply & Screen Blending Modes

This tutorial was made using GIMP 2.6.1.

Before trying the techniques presented in this tutorial you should first make sure that your image has a balanced dynamic range. Bringing details by lowering the highlights and lightening the shadows, while keeping the neutral range mostly unchanged, may result in a great improvement in the exposure of your photo.

Step 1: Check The Dynamic Range

First make sure that your photo uses the entire dynamic range. You can do this by checking the histogram available in levels or curves tools. If it is not well balanced, follow the steps presented in dynamic range tutorial.

Bellow is the photo that I will try to improve in this tutorial (click on it to enlarge):

Obviously this photo needs some improvements, but we will fix here only the exposure. First of all I will try levels and dynamic range approach:

Definitely, not so lucky this time. I have a highlight gap, I will fix it of course, but the effect is not so impressive. Here is the result: