Gordon Campey referred me to an article by Mark Johnson that is in the Member’s area of the NAPP website that deals with painting light and shadow onto an image to give it more depth. When combined with the Orton Effect, it can make that technique even more interesting.
With some input from Gordon I created a Painting with Light and Shadow action set. I’ve got two actions in the set, one that simply creates a layer to lighten and layer to darken the images. Select the layer mask of the appropriate layer and paint with White on that mask to lighten or darken an area of the image.
Not the greatest example, but I had this shot of a fender from a tricycle:
To add some depth and contrast into this image, I applied the Paint with Light action, and painted Light onto the yellow areas and Shadow onto the blue, red and black areas.
You can see how much darker and more saturated the reds and blues are, and the yellow becomes more yellow and less orange.
The Paint with Light action simply creates a layer with a Screen blend mode (makes things lighter) and a Multiply mode (makes things darker). The layer masks are filled with black, so they do not apply any affect to the image. By selecting the layer mask and painting with a soft brush with White, it will reveal some of the lighter color underneath. I’ve seen a number of people use brushes with differing opacities, but I personally like a very low opacity, in the range of 20 – 30%.
I normally paint in Light first, then follow that up with Shadow, but a different approach may work for you.
I thought that I would show this one again, using this alternative to the Orton Effect technique from my earlier post.
To this one:
This action creates a blur layer, then adds a single Levels layer that will probably require adjustment in terms of both the White point and the mid-point sliders to achieve the desired neutral effect. It creates the same Paint with Light and Paint with Shadow layers as the above action, and the same adjustments should be applied here.
In this image I needed to lighten the trees in the background, and darken the barn and the foreground bushes and flowers.
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