Easy Retouch

In this tutorial I'm gonna teach very Easy Retouch technique to bright up your dark looking pictures. So lets start

Step 1

Open Image in Photoshop and Duplicate the layer

Step 2

Go to Image> Adjustments> Shadow/Highlight. To darken the shadows I really only need to move the Shadows Amount slider to the left: in this case a setting of 1% works. I won’t mess with the highlights, but I am increasing the Color Correction slider-setting to +10, and adjusting the Midtone Contrast to a setting of +40. Click OK.

Step 3

Select Highlighted area of image. Go to Channel-> RGB+Ctrl+Click. Then simply Copy and paste them into a new layer.

Now you can adjust the highlights separately from the rest of the photo. For instance, an increase in Brightness/Contrast should work well for this tutorial. Here are my settings applied to the Highlights layer.

Step 4

Let’s add one more lighting trick to give the subject the attention. A simple Lighting Effects filter application should do the trick. Goto Filter->Rander->Lighting Effect. I used Preset of Crosslight for this tutorial

Step 5

After all that, the one problem I think should be addressed is the increase of the yellow cast. By creating a Color Balance adjustment layer and reducing the Yellow/increasing the Blue just a bit in the Highlights and Midtones, we should be able to get a warmer color and a bit more natural.

Final Result

Before

After