Now, what if at this point, you are looking at your after view and you think yourself, I overdid things. I went too far. Well, that is never a problem in Photoshop. Going too far is great because you can always back things off.

Here is how. What I want you to do is go up to the edit menu. And see this command right here, fade variations. Now, it is only going to be available if the last thing you did was the variations function. It is okay if you undid and redid. That is fine. But as long as you did not click inside the image. Even if you click or you do just the smallest little edit, this fade command may be dumb or may say something other than fade variations. Fade only affects the last function you applied. And it only affects certain functions like color corrections and filters, and brush strokes and so on.

Things like selecting an image though is not something you can fade. So, if you end up seeing a dimmed version of this command, step backward. Use this command to keep stepping backward until you undo your variation, re-choose the variations command under the image menu, and then rejoin me here at fade variations. And notice the fade variations command has a keyboard shortcut, which is “Ctrl+Shift+F” or “Command+Shift+F” on the Mac. So, the fade command always has this keyboard shortcut. Go ahead and choose this command. It brings up this tiny little dialog box and you can preview the effects of your changes in the background window here. So, I am just going to drag down this slider just to fade my color correction. So, in this case I am seeing 52% worth of the variations adjustments and a 100% minus 52%, so 48% of the original image. So, in other words it is just mixing the two images.

So, if I want to mix more of my original image I take it to a low opacity value. If I want to mix in more of my variations, my color corrections, then I go with the higher opacity value.

For now, do not worry about the modes. We will come back to blend modes later. But for now we just want to drag this to a point where things look good. Now, for me 71% looks great. I am not going to worry about the exact value too much. I am just going from the visuals here. For you, it might be totally something different.

Once you get the effect you like, I am going to go ahead and click Okay and there we have it. This is before now “Ctrl+Z” to see the over variations version of the image. This is after I faded it. It looks picture perfect. Oh, my gosh! Mad Frederickson, what a wonderful you have done!