SHADOW/HIGHLIGHT
This is one of those tools that you may not have even known existed! It wasn’t until I had been using CS2 for awhile that I stumbled on the Shadow/Highlight tool. It’s a great quickie tool to find detail in your photo that you had given up on, and it’s super easy to use!.
You just need a bit to set up the photo, then you’re ready to go. First off, create a duplicate layer of the photo that you’re working on. Press CTRL+J for the shortcut, or go to Layer-Duplicate Layer.
We’re doing this so that we can later adjust the opacity of our adjustment and add a layer mask if needed. If we run the Shadow/Highlight adjustment without doing this, we’ll be altering our backgroundlayer/original, which is not good..
Say it with me: “I will not mess with my Background Layer. I will not mess with my Background Layer.” Now don’t forget it! 
-On a side note, if you’re using CS3 you can just use a Smart Filter instead of duplicating the background layer and adding a mask, but I’m in CS2 still, so need to take this step-
Okay, So that’s our setup.. now all we need to do is go to Image-Adjustments-Shadow/Highlight.
Basically what this adjustment does is look at all the pixels and differentiates what is shadow and what is highlights. It then will add lightness to the shadow area (or bring down the highlight area, depending on what you do in the sliders). Photoshop automatically puts the Shadow lightening at 50%, but most of the time that is too much, so you’ll probably want to pull it down to anywhere from 15% to 40%. You can watch your photo and see how it looks to gauge where you want to put it.
Now simply press “OKAY”, and then you can adjust the opacity of the layer to make the results more natural. If you are seeing some color shifts, you can always change the blending mode of the layer to “Luminosity”.
I use this step a lot to bring out detail in darker areas of a photo. A good tip is to do your shadow adjustment, invert the mask, then only paint in the areas you want the details to be “revealed” this way you really can fine tune your adjustments.
So in a matter of a minute here’s our before/after:
This week’s freebies are in the Store in the Freebie’s Section. It’s a set of 4 actions. The Quickie Shadow Blaster actions are simply going to do the duplicating/mask creation for you, and boost by the specified amount (15, 25, or 40). The Shadow Blaster Supreme is my own specially tweaked action to really lighten dark areas. If you have a really dark area, use this one, then you can flatten and layer another shadow adjustment on top. Experiment to see what works best!
Don’t forget to leave a comment/question/suggestion/whatever Winner gets a $30 Gift Certificate to the store!!! And don’t forget to snag the shadow blasting actions, they’ll be gone in a week!
Have fun!
