From the course: Photoshop Masking and Compositing: Fundamentals

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Painting with the Soft Light mode

Painting with the Soft Light mode - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop Masking and Compositing: Fundamentals

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Painting with the Soft Light mode

In this exercise, I'm going to show you another way to selectively enhance the contrast of a mask. I've saved my progress as Overlay painting.tif, found inside the 08_everyday folder. And notice that I'm looking at the alpha channel called Overlay Painting, here inside the Channels panel. I am going to convert it to that inverted version of the Blue channel. So you can see just how much detail we lost. So there are the original hairs, and here's what they look like now after overlay painting. So a considerable amount of damage has been done here. Now, I'm not saying that painting with the Overlay mode is a bad thing; it's actually a really, really great technique, but sometimes it goes a little bit too far. So what if you want to produce more subtle results? Well, rather than reducing the Opacity value, as I was saying, that just produces more tepid results. The background will never quite get all the way black, which is what we need. Instead, you ratchet down the blend mode, and let…

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