Using Shadows and Highlights Nondestructively in Photoshop

Happy 2011! We’ll kick off the new year by talking about one of the most important things you can do, as part of your image adjustment workflow in Photoshop.

The Shadows/Highlights adjustment allows you to perfect local areas of contrast in your scene, but unfortunately there is not currently an Adjustment Layer for Shadows/Highlights. Instead we’ll create a Smart Object layer and integrate the adjustment into that layer (as a Smart Filter) so that we can revisit the settings as many times as we need to after saving the document.

I hope you’ll give this technique a look and share it with your friends, as it can make a big difference in the look and quality of your photos, plus it’s nondestructive!

Some other posts by Dan Moughamian

About the author

Dan Moughamian wrote 26 articles on this blog.

Dan Moughamian is an experienced photographer and educator, and has worked with Adobe Photoshop since the early 1990s. He also has extensive experience with Photoshop Lightroom, Photoshop Elements, plugins from Nik software, and many other digital imaging products. As a long-time member of their testing programs, Dan has collaborated with Adobe Systems to help enhance many of the core functions in Photoshop, Lightroom, and Elements. As an educator, Dan's focus is to help photographers at all levels get the most from their digital workflows. Tips on raw editing, layer masking, alpha channels, image adjustments, HDR photography, focus and lighting effects, and perspective correction, are just a few examples of the topics he covers. To learn more, you can visit Colortrails.com

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