From the course: Photoshop CS5 One-on-One: Mastery

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Painting in the Overlay mode

Painting in the Overlay mode - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop CS5 One-on-One: Mastery

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Painting in the Overlay mode

In this exercise I'm going to show you how to selectively increase the contrast of an Alpha channel using a technique known as Overlay Painting. So you grab the Brush tool, you set it to the Overlay blend mode and then you paint with black to make the darks darker inside of an image or you paint with white in order to make the lights lighter. And I'll show you how that works in this exercise. I've saved my progress as Better channel.psd, found inside the 26_masking folder. One of things I recommend you do, as you develop your mask, is save multiple iterations of your Alpha channel, because after all you don't have any layers inside of an Alpha channel. You're working flat and you want to be able to come back to previous versions of the Alpha channel in case something goes wrong which it often times does. Sometimes you make missteps just as you do in the larger world of Photoshop and therefore it's great to be able to come back to an earlier step in the process. So I'm going to grab…

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