Painting with Light: Quick Photo Touch-up Technique Tutorial

Digital photography is one of the main reasons that people start using Photoshop. Touching up images becomes possible like never before because those images are already in digital format.

Some techniques are so easy, but hard to figure out until you're shown the light (pun definitely intended). In this tutorial, we'll learn a very quick and easy technique for painting with light to brighten images and highlight important areas.

Difficulty Level:	Beginner	Time Needed:	10-15 Minutes
		PDF Version:	Download

1	Open Image Obviously we need to start with something. I'll be using the photo below, which I downloaded from sxc.hu's stock photographer remind.

2	Set Color & Start Painting More often than anything else, this technique will be used when you have a photograph of someone inside a house - there isn't a lot "wrong" with the photo I'm working with but we're going to play anyways. The first step here is to set your foreground color. Think of natural lighting colors - a very light, almost-white yellow, oranges, etc. Make sure that any color you use is nearly white, but not quite. Then, grab a brush - it doesn't really matter what one, as long as it's not too large. Create a new layer (Layer, New, New Layer) and start painting the areas that could use highlighting.

3	Layer Mode After you've painted a few key areas, it's time to see how it looks. Go to your layer mode drop-down (it's right at the top of your layers palette, and currently says "Normal") and choose "Overlay". You may want to lower the opacity and/or clean up the painting with an eraser. To add more highlights on other areas, repeat the process using a slightly different color on a new layer. This will start building up a beautiful series of highlight and shadow.

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