Lighten highlight areas

[PLShutterbug]

Hi, I'm trying to lighten wave tops in a painting I'm touching up. I cannot remember from earlier videos how to do this, and I can't find it in the current video series.

In the attached photo, you see some wave tops just 'above' the outrigger that go diagonally up and left toward the top of the painting. In the original these wave tops "pop" a lot more than in this reproduction, so I need to duplicate that.

Can anyone help my memory?

I have the Nikon .NEF raw so will be starting from there ...

Thanks.

[Fixx]

I would probably just select blue areas and manipulate curves. Possibly it could be done also in develop persona to get more fidelity.

[Ron P.]

My approach using the good ol' fashion dodge and burn. Takes more time but also you're adding your personal touches.

[firstdefence]

And a slightly faster alternative would be to make a luminosity selection like so...

In the first part at step 3. I went to Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Shadows and Highlights this loads the luminosity selection in the adjustment filter, from there you can pull the highlight slider to the right and then use the erase brush on the adjustment layer to bring back the beach and the wood in the foreground.

[v_kyr]

Since many ways lead to Rome, another way is to add an HSL adjustment layer, where you then setup/tweak the appropriate colors highlight. Since that's a mask you can tweak it further via black/white brush tool.

[Fixx]

1 hour ago, v_kyr said:

Since many ways lead to Rome, another way is to add an HSL adjustment layer, where you then setup/tweak the appropriate colors highlight. Since that's a mask you can tweak it further via black/white brush tool.

Do you mean that use blend ranges to target highlight? There is no obvious way to tweak highlight areas only.

[v_kyr]

2 hours ago, Fixx said:

Do you mean that use blend ranges to target highlight? There is no obvious way to tweak highlight areas only.

[Fixx]

Nope, that just select colour range and adjusts luminosity across all luminosity values. It does not affect just light tones.I think.

[firstdefence]

This video is quite interesting: 

 

[v_kyr]

2 hours ago, Fixx said:

Nope, that just select colour range and adjusts luminosity across all luminosity values. It does not affect just light tones.I think.

Thus you restrict it to with the pipette selected and shrinked colors, further can mask in/out wanted portions.

[Fixx]

6 hours ago, v_kyr said:

Thus you restrict it to with the pipette selected and shrinked colors, further can mask in/out wanted portions.

 

But eyedropper targets only by chroma, not luma. Further masking is needed to separate light areas. ?

[lacerto]

(...)

[R C-R]

14 hours ago, firstdefence said:

This video is quite interesting: 

It is indeed. Because it is complicated, I bookmarked it for later study, as well as the text version from the author's site.

Also interesting, in the YouTube comments section a reply eventually lead me to this forum topic by @Jepsio, with a pair of macros that apparently automates (most of?) the process.

[PLShutterbug]

On 11/9/2019 at 6:45 AM, firstdefence said:

And a slightly faster alternative would be to make a luminosity selection like so...

In the first part at step 3. I went to Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Shadows and Highlights this loads the luminosity selection in the adjustment filter, from there you can pull the highlight slider to the right and then use the erase brush on the adjustment layer to bring back the beach and the wood in the foreground.

This did it for me, FirstDefence!

Since my .afphoto file already had a masked area for the water, performing that action on the masked layer created a new layer that restricted the highlight action just to the water so no need to touch up the beach or outrigger wood.

 

Thanks.

[firstdefence]

You're welcome.