Photo Effects: Tearing A Photo To Reveal Another

Step 8: Add Some Dramatic Lighting With A Curves Adjustment Layer

Right now the woman's face looks a little too bright for the effect we're going for. Let's add some dramatic lighting to her face, using a Curves adjustment layer and the layer mask it comes with. Don't worry if you've never used Curves before or if it seems too advanced for your current Photoshop skill level.

All I'm going to do is add the adjustment layer. I'm not going to actually do anything with it, other than change its blend mode, which I'll do in a moment. First, I need to add it though, and I want to add it between "Layer 1" and my Hue/Saturation adjustment layer, so I'm going to click on "Layer 1" in the Layers palette to select it.

Then, I'm going to click on the New Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette once again:

This time, I'm going to choose "Curves" from the list:

When the Curves dialog box appears, I'm simply going to click OK to exit out of it, since I don't need to change any of the settings. All I need to do is change the blend mode of the Curves adjustment layer from "Normal" to Multiply in the top left corner of the Layers palette:

And that's going to darken my image for me:

Her face is a lot darker now, but let's use the layer mask the adjustment layer came with to bring back some of the original brightness and give us some dramatic lighting. Select your Gradient Tool from the Tools palette, or press G on your keyboard to quickly select it:

Then, in the Options Bar at the top of the screen, look in the gradient preview thumbnail and make sure you have the Foreground to Background gradient selected (it will be black on the left and white on the right), and click on the Reflected Gradient option:

Then, with my Gradient Tool, I'm going to click somewhere in the middle of the woman's nose and drag my mouse over to the right edge of her face:

I also want to bring back all of the original brightness in her eyes, so I'm going to switch back to my Brush Tool, and with black still as my Foreground color, I'm going to use a much smaller brush (again, you can change the size of the brush on the fly with the left and right bracket keys) and paint over her eyes:

Here's my image after brightening up her eyes: