Lightening faces within a Photo

Taking a GOOD picture is harder than it looks. Often a client will assure you that they have wonderful photos you can use at their Web site. Once you see these pictures you realize they will need to be retouched in order to work. In the photo below a portion of each face is in shadow, let's see if we can lighten those dark areas.

The dodge and burn tool is needed for this operation.

This tool has always been a bit confusing to me. I can never remember which tool does what. My best advice is to think in terms of opposites, the Dodge tool is black and it lightens the image. The burn tool is a white hand and it darkens the image. go figure.

There are several adjustments you can make within the option bar.

Before you begin, take a moment to look up into the option bar, there are several dodge and burn settings. First is an adjustment for the size of the brush, in this examples I used soft round 35. Next is the setting to control the area which will be affected by the tool, midtones worked best for me although originally I thought shadow would be the best choice. Finally there is a setting for the intensity of the correction, I left it at the default of 50%.

When using this tool I recommend a light touch, correct the problem in several passes. I zoomed in, and short quickly strokes over the dark areas. If you hover in one spot on your photo you can really distort the image.

I lightened the photo in 5 steps. Here are the examples of the image as it went thru each stage of lightening. The changes are subtle, until you compare the lightened photo to the original.

Please note, I have chosen a photo which has extreme problems, most images you work with will not be this bad. When dealing with an image like this one, there is a trade off between improving the image and distorting it. The right side of the man's face is somewhat distorted because the original was so dark.

First lightening step on the woman's face, her skin tone is lighter and the neck shadow is reduced slightly.


Next step both man and woman have been lightened all over their face.


Now I reduced the size of the brush, zoomed in, and concentrated on the right side of his face.


I lightened the left sideburn since it seemed out of balance with the rest of his face.

Finally I use the Burn tool to darken her hair and portions of his beard, in an attempt to restore them to their original color. The original is displayed again for comparison.