Today we are going to go over a very simple but useful thing to know in Adobe Photoshop, how to brighten a face. This is important to make whatever image you are working on look professional. Normally this is taken care of while actually taking the photo, but sometimes the lighting environment isn’t perfect. This is where we can come in and make our adjustments! Let’s go over how to brighten a face in Photoshop.
Adding Brightness to a face Adobe Photoshop.
- Import your image into photoshop to begin working on it. I imported some stock footage from Envato Elements, a great subscription based stock footage company with a near unlimited amount of stock footage.
- Go to the left tools to find the selection tool and find the Ellipse tool.
- Go the face you want to highlight. Click in the center and hold the shift+alt keys while dragging out. This will create a perfect circle originating from the center.
- Then go up to select->modify->feather. Depending on how many pixels the photo is, adjust the amount of pixels. I went with 180.
- Go over to the adjustments, and go down to Exposure.
- Increase the exposure up just a little bit, we don’t want it to be too drastic.
Remember with this, don’t go overboard. We want to add just enough light to the face to make it standout. We don’t want so much as to make it look fake or staged. The face should be made a small bit brighter than the surroundings.
A pro tip, is sometimes when you are in a sunny environment, you can reverse the process above, and make everything else in the scene a touch darker, this will give the same illusion of the face being brighter than everything else around it.
If you have any questions or comments, leave them in the comment section below or on the video itself.
