How to Darken a Selection

Forum|Forum|9 years ago
July 16, 2016
7 replies
38808 views

Good morning,

After using the quick selection tool to create the area that I want to work on, I want to darken that area, but am not finding the correct tool/procedure or to get that done.

Any ideas appreciated.

Correct answer Terri Stevens

If you would like a totally different method that gives you possibly greater control visually than the analytical methods you could try this.

1) just make your selection, in this case a beach rock and copy it to a new layer. Ctrl or Command J

2) Create a new layer directly above the layer containing the rock and choose Fill from the Edit Menu

When the dialog appears choose to fill with 50% Grey and set the blend mode of the 50% grey layer to overlay or soft light

3) Clip the Grey layer to the underlying layer containing the rock alt-control-G or option-command-G on a Mac or from the menu

The layers will look like this

4) Now with the 50% Grey layer selected, here called exposure, select a soft brush with a foreground color of 'black' and the opacity set at about 20%, flow is optional and paint over the area to be darkened. (if the foreground color was white it would lighten) . You will find only the selection will be affected due to the clipping mask. If you go too far press X on the keyboard to make the foreground color white and repaint which will lighten the selection. When you are finished you can further refine the dodge and burning by changing the opacity of the 50% grey layer.

Below on the right is what I got using the technique. Sounds hard but just looks that way in print and takes less than a minute to do.

Terri StevensCorrect answer

Legend

If you would like a totally different method that gives you possibly greater control visually than the analytical methods you could try this.

1) just make your selection, in this case a beach rock and copy it to a new layer. Ctrl or Command J

2) Create a new layer directly above the layer containing the rock and choose Fill from the Edit Menu

When the dialog appears choose to fill with 50% Grey and set the blend mode of the 50% grey layer to overlay or soft light

3) Clip the Grey layer to the underlying layer containing the rock alt-control-G or option-command-G on a Mac or from the menu

The layers will look like this

4) Now with the 50% Grey layer selected, here called exposure, select a soft brush with a foreground color of 'black' and the opacity set at about 20%, flow is optional and paint over the area to be darkened. (if the foreground color was white it would lighten) . You will find only the selection will be affected due to the clipping mask. If you go too far press X on the keyboard to make the foreground color white and repaint which will lighten the selection. When you are finished you can further refine the dodge and burning by changing the opacity of the 50% grey layer.

Below on the right is what I got using the technique. Sounds hard but just looks that way in print and takes less than a minute to do.

Abambo

Community Expert

...and all the examples here are a correct answer to your question.

Now which one to choose: I never worked with the burn tool, even that it is the original tool from my earliest Photoshop.

Mostly, I use the Level adjustment or the Curves adjustment as a adjustment layer. Best for non-destructive work. Exposure is too new to for me, and I'm used to the 2 above.

The brightness/contrast adjustment was not working very good in early versions of PS (legacy!), so I use that one only for special adjustments.

ABAMBO | Hard- and Software Engineer | Photographer