More Shawn & Photoshop Tidbit

Here’s another images from Shawn on Friday night (first one here). Sometimes keeping things simple produces nice results too. This shot has a single light (3x4’ softbox) and a reflector on the opposite side for fill. We shot close enough to the background that the main light spilled onto the white background wall.

With only spill the background isn’t fully blown out, but that works so it leaves contrast for the light colored jacket. The dark hair and blue jeans bound the shot at the top and bottom.

Now to the Photoshop tidbit – while reading through a book I saw references to the shadow/highlight dialog. It makes it very easy to adjust the tonal range of an image. But it doesn’t have a direct equivalent in Lightroom/Raw, and it doesn’t show up under adjustment layers in PS, so it’s not always top of mind. For a long time I had dismissed it because I didn’t think it would fit in my non-destructive workflow.

Turns out it does: Since I always bring my images over from Lightroom as a smart object, when going in the menu under ‘Image / Adjustments / Shadow/Highlights’, it adds it as a smart filter to the import smart object. That has two benefits – it doesn’t add any more size to my already large files. And I can still update the imported file settings in RAW and retain the shadow/highlight changes. Also, I can always recall and further tune the settings. I will have to keep playing with this in the next few retouch images to get the hang of this new tool.

I guess Adobe decided to leave it in the ‘Image’ menu for some reason, even though it doesn’t really fit in there as a smart filter. Oh well – the wonders of Photoshop.