Juha M. Kinnunen

Here is a tecnique that one can use to bring up the shadows in a picture that does not have much detail in the shadows. This is often the case when photographs are taken in bright sunlight. Even though we all know that the hours before and after the sunset and sunrise are the best times for photography, because of the warm and even light, one can not demand a photographer to keep his camera in the bag during the day. I prefer using the shadow/highlight in Photoshop compared to the fill ligt in Adobe Camera RAW or Lightroom. In my opinion fill light creates too much halos and often the effect can be quite ugly. Doing this in Photoshop provides much more control and adjustability when one can also use layer masks.

The example image here is a photograph I took last fall in Kuusamo, Finland, in a middle of a day during a long hike. The light is too bright and the exposure is somewhat uneven.

To start, we again switch the image to LAB-mode.

Click Image -> Mode -> Lab Color

Then duplicate the background layer, either by clicking CTRL+J or from the menus select Layer -> Duplicate layer

Then select the newly created layer and click on Channels-leaflet, click on the Lightness and your image turns black and white.

After that select Image -> Adjustements -> Shadow/Highlight...

The following dialog box appears. All the settings of course depend on your source image and the desired effect . Make sure you have the Show More Options clicked on. Then set a high Radius anywhere from 500 up to 2000 and set your Amount to 50 and Tonal Width to 0. Then slowly start increasing the Tonal Width until the image pleases you.

In this image I also used the Highlights slider also to bring down the brightest values in the leaves. This time also with the exact same style by first setting a high Radius, some amount and then increasing Tonal Width.

Click OK when you are done and after that go back to the Channels-leaflet and select all of them. After that you see the adjusted image and now as the adjustement is on a new layer you can reduce its opacity if the effect is too strong. When you are all done change the image mode back to RGB.

Here is the result image that might still need some other adjustements, for exampe, the midtone contrast adjustement with unsharp mask that I covered in an earlier tutorial

Of course one can use the shadow/higlight in RGB-mode also, but using it in LAB-mode provides better results in regards to halos, artefacts and noise.