lighting images tutorial
Ok so you start with a cap, that’s fairly dark and you want to lighten it a little.
First trick is to simply duplicate the layer and set it to ‘screen’
This tends to really brighten every part of the image but if it’s not great quality this technique will show that up! So what I do for this is flatten both those layers together. Go into ‘Filters > blur > smart blur’ set the radius to 25 and hit ok.
Immediately next go into ‘Edit > Fade Smart Blur’ it’s then a good idea to select ‘Lighten’ from the drop down box.
Now I tend to go into ‘Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation’ and lower the saturation a little (-20) and darken the image slightly (-12).
I then go back into ‘Image into Adjustments > Brightness and Contrast’, in here I take the contrast up slightly and brightness down a bit. This usually leaves a result like this.
There are several other tricks I can run over that work very well on images that are very high quality just dark. Duplicate the layer and follow the first step above on the bottom layer, applying the smart blur. No need to select soft light when fading it, just take the % down to about 60. Then select the top layer and go ‘Filters > blur > Gaussian blur’ and set the radius to ‘4’. Then set that layer to soft light, or lighten over the smart blurred layer beneath. You can then flatten the images and work with the saturation, so that when you take the contrast up a bit it doesn’t make the colours distorted, it almost takes them back up to where they should be.
Ok so after a few of these little tricks I end up with an image like this;
Compared to my starting point;