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Painting with Light (or Dark Flash II) |
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Before we get started with this month's feature, we have a contest for you!
Shortly you will be presented with a link to an excerpt from a recent book about
Photoshop CS3. The excerpt shows how to remove blemishes by creating a
soft mask for the face, and then making some adjustments to let parts of the
original image show through by using the eraser tool. Regular readers of
this series will know how to do a more efficient way of making those
adjustments! The contest winner will be the first reader to identify the
more efficient way and notify us. For notification, send a message (to the
Webmaster) using the form on the
Contact Us
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And now, on to our feature of the month. Some time ago we presented our most-used action, the Fill Flash tool, which provides a way to selectively lighten areas of the image where a little more light should have been. The following month we presented the Dark Flash tool, which allows us to selectively darken areas of the image. It's sort of the inverse to the Fill Flash tool.
The key to the Fill Flash tool was the use of a curves adjustment layer set for brightening, with its layer mask initially filled with black. Painting in the mask with white would allow the brightened version of the image to be revealed. The Dark Flash tool also used a curves adjustment layer but set for darkening, with its layer mask also filled with black.
In an interesting variation on that theme, David Ziser has developed a technique for adding light to an image which has first been darkened. It probably works best with black and white images, but let's create the following image.
This appears to have been taken using a soft box set at its lowest power level. In fact, however, the original image looks like this:
To get from here to the final result, let's begin with a curves adjustment layer in which the upper right anchor point is dragged down to about 40% (as seen on the right). Then select a soft brush and press "d" to get the default colors, namely foreground black and background white.
With the maximum brush opacity set to about 30% (just press "3") we click on the layer mask (note the 'selected' border on the mask) and gently paint on the image where we want more light. Now the layer mask looks like this:
The neat thing about this is that you are simply adding the light to where you think the soft box would have done its illumination!
This technique is really quick and takes only a few keystrokes to get started. And because you're using the layer mask, if you add too much light you can simply press "x" to reverse foreground and background colors, then paint the dark back in again. You're spending your time adjusting just what you want to get the desired effect, with no fear of a fatal blunder. I love working in Photoshop with no fear of a fatal blunder!