A quick and easy way to reduce distracting highlights, no matter how complex they are!

This week I’m showing you a super quick and easy to way to reduce the highlights, no matter how complex they are, with a simple trick in Photoshop.

Once you have your image loaded that you want to tame some of the highlights on, click onto you channels tab, then hold CTRL (CMD) + left click the thumbnail.

This will create a selection for you based on the highlights (perfect!), now all you have to do is swap back to your layers tab, add a curves adjustment layer by clicking on the icon below your layers and select “curves”.

This will automatically give you a crazy detailed mask on the curves, based on highlights. Drag the top right part of the curves down about a quarter and then put the curves layer into a group/folder. You can do this by selecting your curves layer and pressing CTRL (CMD)+G to put the curves into a folder.

If you need to refine this mask to just the extreme highlights, click on the mask and press CTRL (CMD) + L and drag the black slider to the right on the histogram (this will crush the shadows and leave only the extreme highlights).

Once it’s in a folder, add a layer mask in black (hold ALT/OPT and click the mask button), or simply fill the standard white mask in black with CTRL (CMD) + I to invert the colour.

Now you can simply paint over this black mask with a white brush over any areas you wish to tone down and you’ll retain all the detail of your original mask, which makes it handy in case you want to use it again later for something else in your layers.

You can simply hold ALT (OPT) and drag your layer mask to copy it to another layer mask.

Here’s a before and after:

If you haven’t seen the last article I did on portrait retouching, I highly recommend you check it out, took a lot of time and effort to compile those tips together for you, so don’t let it go to waste ;).

Fede

Thnx for the quick tutorial, but maybe that was not the best image to use this, idk I personally don’t like the gray sky.
veryferry

I don’t like the sky either. Looks very unnatural. Also it makes the chromatic aberration uglier
- Joseph Parry
  
  True, though I believe you notice this more because you can see the before. Without it as context, the issue would be less obvious (though still there).
  
  This technique works best for smaller patches of distractions or things with detail in them if they are larger.
  
  Thanks for reading and commenting!
James Howard-Davies

Thanks, this is handy. I have been using Curves adjument layer and using Blend If to target the highlights, but this is seem more accurate. One thing I would add is is Alt-Click in the resulting curves thumbnail before you use levels then you can see exactly how far you need to move the slider.