Creating a bleach bypass effect in Photoshop

We show you the Photoshop steps to take!

This process recreates, approximately, a traditional colour film processing effect.

The first step is to create a black and white adjustment layer in Photoshop:

This stage is semi-optional, but we think it works best if you tweak the sliders at this point to produce a strong, fairly high-contrast mono image:

The next step is to change the blend mode of your black and white adjustment to Soft Light:

Now you can flatten your layers (to save on memory and increase speed) and create a hue/saturation adjustment layer:

Now simply lower the saturation by dragging the relevant slider to the left to approximately -50:

Change the blend mode of the hue/saturation adjustment layer to ‘Saturation’:

Now flatten the layers again and duplicate the background layer:

In the ‘Background copy’ layer, quickly double-click just to the right of the thumbnail and the Layer Style dialogue will appear. At the top, change the blend mode to ‘Screen’ and then hold the ‘alt key’ on your keyboard and drag the second half of the black (left hand) ‘This Layer’ triangle all the way to the right, tucking it in behind the white (right hand) triangle. For the remaining half of the black triangle, move this somewhere towards the middle.

And there you have it!