How to brighten up a portrait in only 2 minutes

 

 

Sometimes when you go to brighten up a portrait, you can accidentally ruin your skin tones. With the tips in a new video from Aaron Nace of Phlearn, that problem is a thing of the past.

Since you want to brighten your portrait subject without ruining the skin tones, you'll need to perform two steps, the brightening and also color correction. Don't worry, it's easy. The first step is to open your portrait image in Photoshop and then duplicate the background layer. Next make Shadow/Highlight adjustments using the "shadows" sliders. Nace recommends bringing up amount, tone and radius sliders. Also bring your color up a bit. The next thing is to add contrast to the photo via a Curves adjustment layer. You'll then want to create a layer mask to selectively brighten and increase the contrast only on the brighter areas of your subject. To learn more about how to increase and fine-tune the colors, watch the video below.

(Via Phlearn)