Unleashed Education Blog

Editing Toolbox: How to Balance Shadows with Highlights

editing toolbox free editing tutorials Oct 21, 2022
 

By Craig Turner-Bullock

Have you ever found shadows in an image really distracting?

In this video, I'm working on an image I took on the island of Guernsey with Cody the Cocker Spaniel. I'm finding the hard edged shadows really distracting so I'm going to even them out with the highlights.

I'm taking you through when it might be appropriate to do this convincingly as well as the three characteristics of shade that need to be fixed in this edit.

Timecodes

0:00 Introduction

0:26 Edit Overview

1:05 Considering the direction of the light

1:58 Considering the characteristics of light

2:18 Color Temperature and Contrast

2:47 Masking and making the adjustments

4:56 Refining the mask adjustments

6:24 Before and after

If you like these quick tutorials, you'll love our premium Unleashed Edits - full start-to-finish editing tutorials in Lightroom and Photoshop. These are available in our membership (along with a tonne of amazing pet photography education). We hope to see you there!

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