Help. I'm not good at this stuff...

I bought the photo cds with copyright for my kids' last school photos because the kids were crazy adorable and the prints/photos overexposed. They said in order to fix it they would want to retake the photos. What tips can you give me for fixing overexposed photos (and spot healing)?

Typically I create a duplicate layer and use the multiply blend mode and then make adjustments in levels and sometimes curves. How overexposed are they?

They are a bit to the blue side of things and they all look rather pasty.

I follow you on the make a duplicate layer part...and I'm pretty sure I'm with you on the adjustment levels. But, I'm not very good at blend modes and I don't know what curves are. LOL.

I'm using PSE 9, btw.

Hopefully someone can chime in, as I'm on PS, as far as where everything is. In PS, the Multiply blend mode is located via a drop down menu in the layers palette (defaults to showing Normal).

A quick google search provides that curves are not in PSE. Levels should do a lot for you. It's under the Enhance menu, drag the sliders (small triangles) to adjust your highlights, shadows, and midtones.

I added a new hue/saturation adjustment layer to each one, bumped the saturation and dropped the brightness a touch. Wow. Can't believe the difference! Any other suggestions?

Other then adjusting your levels, I can't think of anything. I do hope you can get it to your liking. I know how frustrating it can be to receive something that you're looking forward to and it's not right

Wendy, try this: Enhance>Adjust Lighting>Brightness and Contrast. Drag the brightness slider just a titch to the left and the contrast slider just a tweak to the right and see how you like it. (Drag your drop-down menu over to one side so you can see what's happening to your photo.) You can keep doing that as many times as it takes to get something that you like. When you're done, use the "Save As" and rename it so that you don't save over your original. I've saved a lot of old photos that way.