People have been using the burning technique to darken a particular area in a photograph since ages ago. I still remember my photography teacher taught me how to do this in our school’s darkroom when I took photography class in high school. With Photoshop, now we can do this technique with 6 easy steps from our comfy bedroom.
Step 1.
Open up your file by go to file>open or ctrl +O
Step 2.
Create new layer by go to Layer>New layer or Shift+Ctrl+N.
Step 3
Choose Gradient Tool, and edit the gradient
Step 4
1. Choose the orange-yellow-orange gradient, then 2. change the colors to black-white-black by clicking on a little box then 3. change the color in the color box.
Step 5
Apply the gradient to the new layer
Step 6
Change the layer to ‘linear burn’ and adjust the fill and opacity of the layer.
That’s it, here’s the before and after photo again
excellent!
Darn – I can’t do that.
No computer in the bedroom… 🙁
Aside from that it’s not really recommendable to apply a technique like that. It appears heavy handed. The other pitfall trying to use gradients is that you rarely encounter motives that lend themselves to a straight line gradient, which returns you to the sentence before. Too visible.
thanks gan