Dang! This may be one of the most genius uses I’ve discovered for fixing Hot Spots in portraits and Color Grading Highlight Blowouts in landscapes. Many people reach for a Luminosity mask for these corrections, but I’ve got something that will blow any Luminosity Mask out of the water… the Selective Color Adjustment Layer!
You heard that right. How in the heck can Selective Color fix a highlight blowout or portrait Hot Spot? Pretty quickly, actually. It’s kind of like concealer or foundation, heck I don’t know what I’m talking about, I don’t use makeup. But, you can use the Selective Color Adjustment Layer to blend highlight hot spots on portraits similar to makeup. You can even make the PERFECT skin tone match which makes this tool for this job unstoppable!
Watch and learn!
• Chapters •
00:00 Technique Intro
00:54 Selective Color Quickly Explained
01:54 Relative vs Absolute
02:47 Fixing Hot Spots with Selective Color
05:47 Advanced Use of Selective Color
07:13 Landscape Blowout Fix
08:28 Final Thoughts and Remarks
For Blake, it's all about the art and process synergy. He dives deep into complex topics and makes them easy to understand through his outside-the-box thinking so that you can use these tricks in your workflow today!
You did it again. This trick will be so useful in my post-prod work / workflow. Efficiency and quality! I will use this for sure. Thank you!
🙂 This was a fun one to discover accidentally.
This is why Blake is the master!! Excellent, out of the box, thinking – again.
haha, I wish I could claim it as that. It was complete accident that happened to be very effective 🙂
Blake, very timely insight for me, as I am about to work on some portraits and a panoramic landscape that can really use this. Many thanks, as always!
Awesome! Hope it works out for ya!
Hi Blake,
Awesome!! I’ve got some photos with a flash hot spot behind the subject. I’m going to try this and see how it goes. Also, not sure if you’re still doing IR stuff, but would this work with an IR hot spot?
Take care and thanks again,
Dennis
For IR hotspots, I always fix them in RAW with a radial mask, similar to how we taught it in the CLiR course. This would not fix that issue.
Blake,
As always great job! Thanks for sharing your knowledge on getting rid of hot spots. Good stuff!
How might you do that with highlights that are not in the sky as you did in the example? For example, if I did macro/toy photography and there are highlights on the toy would I essentially just be trying to match the color of the toy?
Hard to say without seeing. Here’s what I recommend. Open a file that matches your question. Put a Selective Color Adjustment Layer on top of it. Then experiment 😉
I can’t say if it will work or not. I have no idea what you are looking at. You’d have to do the work to see if it fixes your issue. I mean this with the most respect possible.
No worries. I am curious if I were to use the selective color technique using black or neutral should I use them in separate layers and not in one layer together? Sorry, really still feeling my way around PS. I love what I am learning with this and have tried it on a few older images (Im sure it works better on raw images over jpeg).
Works very well indeed on “lightstreams” in water. I love strong contre-jour lighting and I have used every trick in the book – Select Color Range, luminosity masks, the lot – to deal with the bright diamonds in the water. This technique of yours is dynamite, especially in combination with a colour grade. Trouble is, I’m going to have to go back over all my old images and fix ’em.