Creating bronze skin in photoshop with local contrast
You have probably seen this effect on sports shots, wrestling, boxing etc.. it gives a gritty bronze glow to the skin, almost makes people look like video game characters.
This is done by perfect control over what’s called Local Contrast.
First go to select color range, select shadows from the drop down list. Now with the selection active add a curves adjustment layer, don’t do anything to the curves yet, just click OK to add the curves adjustment layer. As you can see, the layer mask is added where the shadow selection was.
Do the same again but this time select Midtones in the drop down in color range.
And last, do the same again, but select highlights in the color range drop down.
Now you have 3 curves adjustment layers controlling local contrast over shadows, midtones and highlights.
Select all 3 layers and hit Control+G, this will add them all to a group.
Now play around with the curves adjustments for the 3 layers, try pulling the curves up or down, adding an extreme S curve etc.. Every image will be different depending on where the highlights/midtones/shadows fall so there’s no recipe I can give here, but it’s easy to get the look of you just mess around.
You will of course notice that the adjustments affects the entire image, let’s fix that. With the group selected, hold down ALT and click on Add Layer Mask to add a Hide All black layer mask.
Now select your brush tool (B) hit 10 on your numerical keyboard to set the brush opacity to 10, adjust the brush hardness to 0 and paint over the skin to slowly build up the effect.
