Applying Shadow & Highlight Effects in Photoshop

Series Summary

Photoshop is an industry leading image manipulation software by Adobe Systems. Professional photographers, graphic designers, and animators all use this powerful tool to improve, edit, touch up, and manipulate their respective arts. But one need not be a professional to understand and put to use this amazing software, all that is necessary is a computer. Whether editing a photo or video, or designing one from scratch, Photoshop is a media editing giant.

This free video clip series will provide tips and advice for some basic editing techniques in Adobe Photoshop. Each clip will guide you through a feature of the software that you'll find very helpful when editing photos, images, pictures or videos. Whether a novice or an expert it's a great way to brush up on features of the program.

Video Transcript

"Hi this is Jimmy Hartman on behalf of Expert Village. In this clip on our series on how to touch up a landscape photograph, we'll be focusing on changing our jpeg image into a Photoshop layer and then adding in the basic shadow and highlight filter. OK in this part of the tutorial we are going to be taking a standard jpeg image that I've imported from my camera and we're going to be doing a few touchups on it. The first thing if you notice here. You've got all this area right in here that's all blackened out by shadows obviously since the sun is behind it. Your water also doesn't have much detail it?s pretty much washed out. Your sky is a bit dull and we just kind of want to touch things up maybe spice it up a little bit so it looks like a better picture. First thing we're going to want to do. I've got to expand my layers here and as you can see it just says background layer. Now this is typical of what happens when you import a jpeg image in Photoshop. The negative to having this as the background layer and being locked as it is, is you can see this FX button here and this mask button here on my cursor are both dulled out so I can't use them. Now those are very important features, generally in Photoshop. So usually I will go ahead and convert this to a Photoshop layer and to do that, the simplest thing to do is just double click the word background and then you get this new layer dialogue opens up. I'm just going to accept the settings, click OK and now its a layer. Now I can add a layer mask or add a layer style which has plenty of options but we won't get into those now. OK the next thing we're going to do. We've analyzed our photo and decided we want to bring out these shadows a little more we want a little more detail in there so in our layers, I'm going to duplicate this background layer. One way you can do that is just to hit control J on your keyboard and that will copy the layer and just name it that layers name with copy. You can also go to layer and then duplicate layer. OK now that we've got our duplicate layer we're going to go to image adjustments shadow and highlight. Now this is an amazing filter, if you probably already noticed what it did. I'll click this preview button again. It went ahead and brought out all your shadows on the water and on the mountain; it kind of gave you a little bit of that color in that mountain, some green. What you can do with this, you've got shadow slider and a highlight slider. This basically lets you adjust how much of each of those you want (the shadows) you want to bring out. And for the highlights, its how much you want to dim those highlights, take those down a bit. We're ok with our highlights as they are maybe add a little bit and bring it down just a little bit. Our shadows we're going to go ahead and make that 50% and we can click the preview again, kind of see what we are going to get and then we hit OK. Alright now that's been applied to that layer that we just copied and the reason we copied that is because the shadow and highlight option is a destructive filter. It actually modifies pixel detail in your image. So you can't, once you start going through things, you can't just turn that off. But if you make a duplicate layer as you see here, we can press this eye button and turn it off and we still have our original layer and you can kind of see what your work has done already."