I showed you how to improve shadows and highlights. But what if our image is even more flat, then I showed you the picture I showed you actually look quite well. So this is image before I was adding the shadows and highlights and it's quite flat. So what if you want to have really full control on the shadows and highlights even on the higher level. I'm using color wrench once again, and I hope you really will be forecast now. Actually, it's quite simple technique.

Everything I'm showing you is quite simple. You just have to open your mind sometimes. So let's start with curves. I'm creating this one layer. I'm going to call this highlight and the other curve layer, or maybe I'm just copy from this. Of course blending mode luminosity.

And the other will be Anza shadows. So I'm starting with highlight. First what I'm going to do, I'm going to Select and Color Range, except sampled colors and all of these colors. We also have highlights mid tones and shadows, which will be very powerful for our work. I'm going to start with highlights, I always put my wrench up to 255 the wrench for highlights has to be high. And then I'm going up with fuzziness to find that level where my highlights will be well exposed and that will be around that I can see this nice highlighted area over here, maybe even a little bit more and then hit OK. course it could be probably even a little bit better exposed but that is Just enough if you don't want to affect the background, but maybe you'd like to work with the background a little bit later, there's nothing more simple just just mask it out.

Just say again with black color, I'm just going to paint over the background. Because just in case I don't want to affect that. But of course for this image, actually, I wouldn't mind and softly over here, just like that. Of course, you can improve this later with other masks. I'm going to keep this jumper for now. And what I'm going to do, I'm just going to pull up the curve to improve prove the highlights before after strong improvement.

This highlights right now actually are popping out. So this is definitely really powerful if you need to pull up very selective highlights. I'm not doing anything more than that. Usually now let's go to shadows. Of course, I could just copy from the highlight, but I want to do more selective thing. So I one thing I'm going to select and colorant I'm going to start with highlights why because I don't really feel comfortable working with shadows over here.

The wrench doesn't give me the comfort that I have with the highlights why I prefer to work with highlights, always. So the wrench for the shadows is usually too wide. Going up with the fuzziness, too. Make the wrench a little bit smaller. And then I'm going to invert this layer for the shadows. And after that, I'm just going to drag it down a little bit and up over here to not make it too strong.

And that is the effect I would expect before After massive change, as you keep can see, especially on the highlighted area, and that's how I work. And what can I say like you can have even more control over the highlights that was very, that was more advanced technique, but still in the basic version, what I could do over here, I could actually go with the highlight area. And that's how it looks like. I'm going to turn off RGB masks on the channel So I have this highlights mask. How to make this highlight even more strict more. Somewhere over here because it's quite wide range.

I will press Command or Control and heat on this layer. And then I'm going to press shift out ocean command and heat on this to multiply the effect and then create an mask. And this new mask, as you can see, is even much more selective than what we had before. So I'm going to press Command and heat up this to take a selection and create a new curve layer. Of course, now I unclick that, that's my mask that I created. I know it's maybe a lot of information for this one panel.

And I could go up over here as well. If I want to make even nicer highlights for my image go in like, strictly from these points over here as the brightest ones. This triangle over here, went to a little bit wider, wider areas. That would be a very unwise, advanced way of working with the highlights. Feel free to use channels. That's super powerful.

Of course, every time you do this, I could multiply this Much more clients present shift out option command. And, sorry, heat on this and then create a new one. As you can see, it would be even more and more so give you a lot of control of working with the highlights. Barely you need that. I have to be honest, this is if you're interested about that, of course you can invert in that. The same way as you do other things just command and i, you kind of invert that and then selection, multiply the same way.

Shift Alt option command, click on this and as you can see, you're making a different mask more wider for the shadows. So there is a lot of different ways of working with highlights to achieve perfect highlights, through your masks on the image and Of course there is much more or the details I will explain you then in a few other lessons just to not put too many information in that lesson but I believe this was super valuable. You not now know how from flat image good to very strong contrast stick image