Getting started

First go ahead and download this action, it is free for my website visitors, you can download it and use it as you please. (If the download link below does not work, there is a mediafire link at the bottom where you can download the action as well).

Download Here: [download id="1"]

After you download the action, open your actions window in photoshop (alt + f9 in windows) and drag and drop the action from your download destination to the actions window. You should see the action labeled as “Darken/Lighten”. Next open up your image of choice, select the action that you just imported and click the play button.

After running the action, you should now see your background layer with two additional layers on top of it. One named Darken, and one named Lighten. These are both layer masks filled in with black, so to darken or lighten the photo, simply get a soft basic brush with a diameter of around 50 to 100 px (depending on the image), an opacity of around and a color of white.

Using the action

Now to darken or lighten the photo, just select the layer for what you want to do (darken or lighten) and use the brush tool on the area that you want darkened or lightened. For this example, I am going to use the darken layer and use the brush tool on the power pole to make it darker, and then use the lighten layer on the sky to make it brighter.

Before

After

In conclusion

This action can be used for a very wide variety of purposes, for this photo I just used it to correct the exposure. The effects can be altered by varying the opacity and the size of the brush you use, and you can also duplicate the lighten or darken layers to double the effect. Remember, with photoshop, experimentaion is vital to the expanding of your techniques. Play around a little bit, youll be surprised with what you can do.

Questions?

Leave a comment, I will reply.