How to relight and area of a photo

[John Thompson]

If you ever have the need to increase brightness of an area in a photo you can do it in PS by

Creating a new layer

Paint the area you want to brighten white

Change the blend mode to Overlay

Then change the opacity to give you the proper lighting.

This works nicely but if the portion you want to brighten is intricate then just roughly white paint the area, add a mask and invert the mask and paint in the area on the mask to brighten.  The reason I add the mask is that when you are painting in white you can easily go “beyond the lines” so to speak.  Meaning, lets assume you have a pic of your dog and you want to highlight the face.  While you are trying to just paint the dogs face and ears you can easily go to far and it will lighten the background for example.  Then the only way to correct is Ctrl-Z and do it again.  When you do the mask and over paint around the edges then just change the foreground color to black and darken it back to original.

There are other ways of doing this like using a curves adjustment layer, invert the mask and paint the areas on the mask you want to show thru.  This method can change the colors of the highlighted area which you do now want.

[Rob Wood (Admin)]

Very useful. Thank you.

[Mistyisle]

Many thanks, John! Reading your procedure, it seems completely logical, though I have to try it yet. For those of us in the 21st Century and using Affinity Photo, it should work at least equally well. 😉

[John Thompson]

I assume it would work although I do not know because I have never tried Affinity.

[Mistyisle]

One of the things about Affinity, John, is that each new Adjustment layer automatically has its own mask. It’s a good way to work!

[JasenkaG]

A great way to explain it, thanks!

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