How to Fix Dark Shadows in Photoshop

today I'm going to show you how to fix dark shadows in Photoshop hey guys and welcome to phlearn my name is Aaron NACE and you can find me on phlearn comm where we make learning photoshop & photography fun and we got a quick episode for you guys it's super helpful how many times have you taken a portrait and your shadows are just too dark you can't see any detail in the darks whether it's in a face or something someone's wearing it's just so dark you can't see it now we're going to show you a great technique that involves bringing those shadows up without affecting your highlights we're going to show you why levels and curves aren't necessarily the best tools for the job and why we're going to use the shadows highlight feature in Photoshop to bring up those shadows alright guys let's go ahead and jump into Photoshop so here's our image for today from Adobe stock and we can see our very handsome man and he looks great except for some of these areas are just really dark here in the suit for instance I really can't see any detail not only that but here in the ID it's so dark that I just really don't get an idea of the detail in that area so we want to figure out how we're going to go ahead and brighten those up so let's go ahead and start off using like levels and curves something you might traditionally use and I'll show you the positives and the negatives of using both of those okay so let's come up an adjustment layer we're going to go down here to levels now if we want to make our darks a little bit brighter what we can do is take our midpoint slider and we can just bring this to the left and we can see our darks are getting a bit brighter and now we can see a good amount of detail in our subjects shirt and here in the eye but the problem with this is that it's taking the rest of a skin and really washing it out doing the same thing with the background as well you can see it does look good in the shadows but here on the skin here in the highlights it doesn't really look good now we can take our dark levels and bring them up to make things darker or our whites to make things even brighter but that's not going to fix it either so we're going to run into the same thing with curves let's grab a curves adjustment level there we go and here we can see by clicking here and dragging our darks a little bit brighter we're basically running into the same problem even if I try to make my darks brighter and brighter and brighter my lights are getting too light so those are the kind of the downfalls of using levels and curves to darken or to brighten those darks all right let's show you guys a better technique of how you can do this without affecting your highlights so we're going to use the shadows highlight function in Photoshop so for this you need to make a duplicate of your background layer we don't want to affect our background layer so we're going to click on our background and hit ctrl or command J that's going to duplicate it okay now we're going to go to image down here to adjustments and all the way down here it's kind of hidden in the menus to shadows and highlights all right let's go ahead and click that up and it'll open up our menu here now this is the simple version of the menu let's click on the show more options in here it's going to get a little bit more advanced alright we're going to start off with everything down to zero and this is what our image basically looks like straight out of camera now this is going to allow us the ability to adjust our shadows and our highlights separately so if we take our shadows and we start to bring these up a little bit there we go we're going to want to bring our tone up a little bit as well okay and our radius you want to find you generally want to keep your radius pretty low and bring your amount and your tone there we go up until you can start to see the detail in those shadows all right now you don't want to go too far you're going to get start to get some weird effects here but you can see that it's not affecting the highlight detail in the image in fact the highlights are exactly where they were before now if you do want to take the highlights and you want to make those a little bit darker you can affect these as well now in my opinion I usually keep the highlights where they are because something like this just really doesn't look natural so I would consider affecting the tone and the amount there we go right there and this is just going to be playing around kind of it's gonna be different for every image that you do basically want to find the balance between your tone and the amount and your radius I recommend keeping a little bit lower you tend to get like weird like glows and things like that if you bring your radius higher so I'm gonna bring my radius nice and low there we go and that's going to keep things looking a lot more natural all right there we go now if you do find that you need to change the color for instance if you have if you brought your detail into shadows but there really isn't much color you can see here in his hand there's not a lot of color there you can bring your color up and it's going to add more color back into your shadows so just choose something that looks pretty natural something like that looks really good all right bring our tone up and here we can see detail in the suit but it doesn't distract it doesn't actually take away the detail from the highlights in the image all right so let's go ahead and hit OK all right cool let's look at our before the after so here's the before and there's the after so you can see all of the highlight detail is maintained and it brought up the detail in the shadows so that's it guys super quick and easy so instead of next time when you want to bring up the shadow details don't use curves don't use levels just make a duplicate go to image adjustments and then to shadows and highlights and that's all you have to do guys thank you so much for watching this quick episode if you want to learn more photoshop & photography from phlearn comm just click on your screen right now big subscribe button and you will send you more free photoshop & photography videos every single week and if you have an idea for an episode just leave it in a comment right down below we'd love to hear from you thanks so much guys i'll phlearn you later bye everyone oh nice and quick easy does it that's how we do in it today you

Channel: PHLEARN

Views: 278,520

Keywords: Phlearn, Photography, Aaron Nace, Photoshop, Adobe, Tutorial, Help, Tips, How-to, Education, How to Fix Dark Shadows, Fixing Dark Shadows in Photoshop, Shadows in Photoshop, Highlights in Photoshop, Curves, Levels

Id: hHpYpT-lZyE

Length: 6min 9sec (369 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 08 2016