This blending mode has vast potential to enhance and finesse your imagery:

• Duplicating a layer and applying soft light can be used to enhance color and smooth out textures

• Blurring the soft light layer causes a subtle hazing/smoothing effect.  Feel free to duplicate the soft light layer and/or adjust opacity on layers to get the right effect.

• If parts of your image are "muddy" or you would like to change the color temperature, you can add a blank soft light layer and paint in color on top of the image.  Adjust the opacity of your paintbrush to around 10-20% to bring color in slowly.

• When building composite images in Photoshop, adding a few color fill layers of soft light (or multiply, screen, overlay, etc. [covered in later posts]) at various opacities will help to give a consistent flow to the piece.