Using Local Control
To Lighten Or Darken
Portions Of Your Image
With A Wacom Tablet

What the heck is Local Control?

Well - it is a technique with a Wacom Tablet (a Graphire, Bamboo or Intuos) in Photoshop (Elements and Standard) that enables you to make opacity changes to a small part of your image without affecting the rest of the image.

Local control over your image is one of those techniques that you will use over and over again.

How to set it up:

1. Open your image.

2. Create a Soft Light Layer ... Layer > New Layer.

3. In the New Layer dialogue box drop down the Mode selection and choose Soft Light.

4. At the bottom of the New Layer dialogue box there is a check box that says "Fill With Soft-Light-Neutral Color (50% gray)" - put a check mark in the box.

5. Click OK

This is the first step in achieving local control over your image.

The 50% gray you set in the last step will not be visible until you begin painting on your image with the brush.

1. Set the foreground and background colors to Black and White by pressing the D key. These are the default colors in Photoshop.

2. Select the Brush Tool (B)

3. Open the Brushes Palette and make sure that Other Dynamics is set for Pen Pressure (Opacity) and its selection box is checked.

4. Now comes the fun part - if you want to lighten a dark area then select white as the foreground color. The foreground color is the one on top and the background is the one behind it. If black is on top and you want to lighten a part of your picture either press the (X) key or click on the little arrow between the foreground and back ground colors. If you want to darken an area then you need black as the foreground color.

5. Move your pen over the image, place it lightly on the tablet and make a few experimental strokes. If you don't like the result you can start over by pressing CTRL-Z (CMD-Z MAC) to undo what you just did.

Here is a before and after example of this technique. click on each thumbnail to see a full size picture.

In the original picture (on the left) the church was very dark and the sky was too light with not a lot of detail. I used a soft light layer with my pen control set to opacity to do the correction I wanted.

As you can see, the corrected photograph on the right is lighter at the front of the church while the sky, especially the blue patches, stand out more and there is more detail in the clouds.

It took about 5 minutes to go from start to finish.

Work with it until you are satisfied. If you botch it up then delete the layer by dragging it into the Layers Trash Can and start over.

You can achieve some amazing results with this technique and maybe even save a photograph you thought was lost.

And - you might even amaze your friends and family!

If you are having trouble with this technique then send me a message on the Contact Page.

If you came to this page from the Photoshop Tutorials page click to return there from the Local Control. page.