Brighten. Darken. Highlight Your Subject in 5 Easy Steps

Sometimes you need to highlight your subject to make sure they’re attention-getting and that it’s immediately clear what’s important in the photo. In today’s article, we’ll show you how you can make a photo’s subject shine using local brightening and darkening. After all, photographs are about light. And today’s edit will be about light too.

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AuthorMajo Elias

I’ve been taking pictures since 2004. When I was starting out, I photographed almost everything. Later my style solidified and I began photographing people almost exclusively. At the moment my main genres are fashion and advertising.

Comments (3)

  1. Unfortunately I did not manage to apply these steps to edit a photo. I wanted to darken a very bright sun in my “Sunset photo”. So the sun did not get dark just a little bit of its surrounding. And the the elliptical selection did not disappear So the steps are not for dummys :) any one who can share just short, the steps.

    1. The part of the picture with the sun might be blown-out. That means you can’t actually fix it, because the pixels in that part of the picture contain no color information, they’re just white. Isn’t that your case? In that case no darkening would work.
      If you need help with anything particular, please write us to support@zoner.com, we’ll be happy to help you.

  2. thanx for reply. Yes it is.

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