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When you want to apply an adjustment that only affects a specific area of a photo,
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sometimes the best way to go about that is to simply paint the adjustment into
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the image. In this photo, for example, you can see
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that over in the trees there's a real lack of contrast.
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The top portion of the tree looks good, but most of the mid-section here looks
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very drab. A little bit gray and flat.
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And I'd like to enhance contrast there. And in fact also for the boathouse in the
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distance as well. I'll start off by applying an adjustment
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that I think will be an appropriate adjustment for the image, and more
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importantly, an adjustment that is fairly obvious, very plain to see.
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I'll add a Curves adjustment in this case, and I'm going to drag my curve
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upwards, since this is a black and white image.
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I'll drag the curve upward in order to add some density, but I want to focus
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that adjustment on the darkest portions of the photo.
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If I scroll down a little bit, you can see that the dark portions of the curve
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are over on the right side, and the lighter portions are over on the left side.
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So I want this anchor point to be over on the right side, and I want to raise it up
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in order to add density. But I also want to have some contrast in
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the photo, and so I'm going to drag the left side down just a little bit.
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Now, I'm obviously affecting the entire image, and so it's very difficult to
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evaluate whether or not this is a good adjustment.
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The most important thing at the moment is that it's an obvious adjustment.
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I can then focus on having this adjustment only affect specific areas of
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the photo. And the way I prefer to work, when I'm
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applying a targeted adjustment in this way, is to first fill the layer mask with black.
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The layer mask starts off filled with white, that's the default, so that the
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adjustment layer will effect every single pixel in the image.
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I'm going to fill with black so that the adjustment will not affect any pixels in
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the image. I'll go ahead and choose Edit and then
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Fill from the menu. I've already made sure that the layer
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mask itself is active, and then I can choose Black from the Use popup and click OK.
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That will fill that layer mask with black, so now the adjustment is not
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affecting any of the image. Next I'll choose the Brush tool from the
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toolbox, and then make sure that I'm working with a brush that has a 0%
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hardness, a nice soft edge. The Blend mode needs to be set to Normal
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and I will leave my opacity at 100%. Now again in the context of a layer mask,
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Black blocks the adjustment and White reveals the adjustment.
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And so in order to reveal the adjustment in the tree area here, I'll want to paint
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with white. I can press the letter D on the keyboard
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to set the colors to the defaults for a layer mask, which are a white foreground
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color and a black background color. I can also switch back and forth between
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those by pressing X on the keyboard. But in this case, I want to paint with
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white, and so I'll click and drag in the image, painting over the area that I want
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to adjust. In this case, for the most part, the tree here.
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And because I've applied a little bit of an exaggerated adjustment, I'm able to
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see the effect very, very clearly within the photo.
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Once I feel that I have the area that I want to adjust well defined, I can go
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back to my Curves Adjustment layer and change the effect within the photo.
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I think in this case, I'll make the image a bit darker.
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That looks to be a pretty good result. I can turn off the visibility for the
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Curves Adjustment layer and then turn it back on in order to evaluate the result.
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That might be just a little bit too dark, so I'll tone things down just a little bit.
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That looks much better. So once again, evaluating by turning off
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the visibility for the Curves Adjustment layer, we can see the original image,
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which has areas that are very washed out. And then turning on the visibility for
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that Curves Adjustment layer, we can see that we've greatly improved the overall density.
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Obviously, there's a fair amount of other work that's needed in this image, but I'm
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happy with this initial starting point, painting in order to apply a targeted adjustment.