How to Lighten Certain Areas of an Image

Alright, here we go. We’re going to work for this image of father with a little newborn baby. First thing I want to do is just point out that the image size has been reduced to 72 resolution of the camera. It came up at 300 but in order to speed things along I reduce it to 72. Anyway, the same steps will apply and the first step we always do as normal and it’s kind of the unusual is called sharpen, unsharp mask and we’re not sharpening. We’re doing the old good defog so 20, 60, 0 are the three settings and of course what that does is punches up the contrast and takes the haze away.

I’m not going to work on any color enhancement because this image here is going to be going Sepia tone. That’s the ultimate end result but I do want to kind of beef up the tones a little bit so I’m going to run into levels here and you notice I under exposed it a little bit. Let’s just crank that over a little bit. I don’t normally like to play with contrast too much for fear of overdoing it because most of the time I get these things pretty close and the exposure is pretty important and kind of missed it on that one, didn’t I? Let’s look at this area right here right under dad’s chin. We’ve got double thing going on. People generally do not like that and back in the good old days we use to reduce that with pencils and oils and what not.

So we’re going to use the clone stamp to duplicate that look and it’s a bit tricky at times. What you want to do is do one of two things. We’re going to darken the light areas, see how light it is right there and we’re going to go to low opacity but stick with 24 and maybe a bigger brush and we’re going to darken that light highlighted area which is creating almost a sculpting effect of the chin line.

I’m going to go lighting and what I’m going to do now is do the reverse as I’m going to lighten that dark area and make it smaller. We still have a light area and I’m going to back and darken that and I'm going under here. I want to smooth the lines out effectively, blinding the men with the other areas around it. So a little bit tricky to do at times but if you take the line away or most of the line away it removes the illusion of the double chin. Now we can go in and just start to use the burn tool, the smaller brush, low opacity on mid tones and just create a little more shadow in effect just in the chin area just to darken it.

So I’m going to stick with the burn tool and go back to highlights and now I’m going to burn all the way around in highlight mode just to give the pixels something for the burn tool to bite into because I’m going to now switch that to mid tone and do another burn, always starting with the highlight blend mode first. You know this area down here is getting a little bit obvious with the back and the background showing so I’m going to burn that down. I want to create a much more dramatic look. That’s effectively what we’re doing now.

Next thing, I want to do go to adjustments, hue saturation, click on colorize, type in 25 and they will gather Sepia tone 25, 25, 0. There’s our Sepia tone and it’s almost there folks. Let’s just run a couple of actions and actually I’m just going to run one more action and then I’m going to add a little bit of noise. So we’re going to run the hedgy soft and do another burn always starting with the highlight blend mode first and you notice this area down here, it’s get a little bit obvious with the back at the background showing so I’m going to burn that down. I want to create a much more dramatic look, it’s effectively what we’re doing now.

Next thing I want to do go to adjustments use saturation, click on color eyes, type in 25 and then we’ll gather Sepia tone 25, 25, 0. There’s our sepia tone and it’s almost there folks let’s just run a couple of actions. Actually I’m just going to run one more action and then I’m going to add a little bit noise, so we’re going to run the hodgy soft, make that little bit softer and there we go. All these steps are included in the action softening and then now we can erase whatever area we wish to, to reveal some of the not soft areas. We’re going to stick with that that looks pretty good.

I’m going to wonder his eye a little bit right here and it’s going to retouch that a bit and I’m going to go to lighting and low opacity. Let’s enhance that under the eye a bit and finally, we’re going to add a little bit of noise. Give it a little bit of mood. So there you have it, a piece of cake and it’s all done. Hope you enjoy that.

Okay I changed my mind and I’m going to add a few more things to it. I am going to add a pinch drive to it, very easy to do. We’re going to add like a competition gallery look so what I’m going to do is go to the background color and there’s a lot of ways you can do this. You can pick a color within the image and then once you’ve got that you can go into your color picture tool here and pick any tone or range of tone and once you’ve got that select it right here.

We’re going to go to canvas size and make sure what we can click of relative and go to the old fashion manually and type in the numbers mathematically and just like to go in and a nice thin pinch drive for a larger image you would go with a larger pinch drive. Don’t go too loud and you could see the pinch drive ball around there and the next thing we’re going to do is I’m going to go in here now and pick a darker one. I’m going to show in the second how you can make that pinch drive a little bit lighter but just let me finish this here and let’s go to and to and there we have a very subtle and there’s the pinch drive and I’m going to go back in history here and pick some even lighter if you want it to pop out a little bit more, canvas size and again point zero eight. That’s the numbers that I used and that even jumps out a little bit more.

Go into here, you can make it even darker now for the background, image adjustments and canvas size. Let’s go three and three so there’s a lot of different ways you can do that if you wanted to, go in there and add a nice drop shadow and let’s just look at the size here. Okay that’s 9x14. Let’s go new and go to inches,16x20 and then I’m going to create a new background and what I’m going to do here is I’m going to pick two colors and let’s just go with those two right there and I’m going to go to filter, render, clouds and there are two colors blended as clouds. Now let’s go to filter, blur and Gaussian blur and we’re going to blur them even more and let’s open up image adjustment levels and we want to darken that a bit more.
Now, let’s go and grab the move tool, go back to the original image and if you hold down the shift key, drag it over and it will drop right in the middle. Now I want to drop set, there’s two layers so all you have to do is click on the top layer and you can go in and grab your drop shadow. I like to go normal and go into color picker, just for fun, I’ll have a nice deep red and there you can see the drop shadow.

I’m going to increase it just a little bit more, just for effect. There it is so there’s your drop shadow. Again you don’t want to overdo it, just make it subtle and once you are done go to layer, flatten image or you can save that as a PSD files and you want to go back at it later and fix it so there you go, two variations on a nice pinch drive and background.