Dodging in Photoshop to fine tune comics

 Hi All,

Lots of things going on, not much hobby. What I did do though is start looking at techniques for restoring old photos and fine tuning exposure issues in Photoshop.

The video instructions that I found helpful were this one by Karl Taylor and this one by Phlearn.

I've had an issue for a long time in my comics where the figures tend to show too dark. I have known that I could do some things to fix it but hadn't really put in the effort to understand it until now.

You may remember this picture from my last comic. As you can see, the figures are pretty dark and muddy looking. They don't read well.

So let's open it back up in Photoshop and see if we can fix it.

 Here I've reopened the picture and inserted it into the comic template I made. This is the base layer Smart Object being edited. You can also see that I zoomed in on our subjects, the Isengard Uruk Hai.

With your layer selected, add a Curves adjustment layer.

Pull the Highlights up on the curve. You can see how everything is brighter now.

With the Curves Mask selected press Ctrl+I to invert the mask. Thus removing the Curves effect.

Take you paintbrush and paint White over the areas where you want the Curves effect. I did it a little sloppily here just to give you an idea. I used a soft brush with 50% flow. Building the effect up with a lower flow brush might be better. You can also change the opacity and blend mode of the adjustment layer to further tweak the effect.

Before.

After.

So you see, it just helps bring back detail that got lost and I think makes a big improvement. I'm not sure what took me so long to address this issue, oh well.

I hope you learned something useful.

Hobby your way.