Photo retouching tip - Making a white room look whiter

I love this quick and easy photo retouching tip to help make my all-white bedroom in my photography studio really look light-filled and bright in the final portraits. If you’d rather not read the article, watch the short 3-minute video below, or keep scrolling for the step-by-step instructions.

When you position your subjects close to your light source, the background will usually end up looking dark and dingy due to the light falloff.

To combat this, you can either move your subject farther from the light source and closer to the background or manipulate the photo after the fact to make your background lighter. Since my light source was already pretty dim (it wasn’t a very bright day), I didn’t want to move them far from the window. If I did, I would need to bump up my ISO even higher and end up with a grainier image. Photoshop was the winner for me in this lighting scenario.

Take a look at these before and after images when applying this photo retouching technique.

Step-by-step retouching instructions

Open the photo in Photoshop.
Add a Curves adjustment layer.
In the curves tool, select the hand with the up and down arrows (this hand lets you select the tonal area that you wish to manipulate in curves).
Click on the background of the image (or the area of the image you wish to brighten) and drag up to increase the brightness until it reaches the desired level. This is going to blow out your subjects in the foreground. Let’s fix them…
Click on the white mask beside the curves layer.
Choose the brush tool and change it to black. I like a soft brush so that it feathers the edges.
Use the black brush to mask away the over-exposure on your subjects in the foreground. Make your brush smaller around the edges of their bodies to prevent a halo.
Check your mask by turning your curves layer on and off. Add more or less to the mask as necessary to prevent a halo around your foreground subjects.

That’s it!! Watch the video above to see those steps in action. I hope you found it useful! Below are more photos where I used this same technique.