Step 10: Paint Over Areas To Hide The Glow Effect

With the Brush Tool selected and black set as your Foreground color, paint over any areas in the image where you want to hide the glow effect. Since we're painting on the layer mask, not the image itself, you won't see any black appearing as you paint. Instead, you'll see the glow effect disappearing from view in those areas.

You can control the size of the brush as you paint using handy keyboard shortcuts. Press the left bracket key ( [ ) to make the brush smaller, or the right bracket key ( ] ) to make it larger. You'll want to use a soft edge brush as you paint, and you can control the hardness of the brush edges by adding the Shift key to the shortcuts I just mentioned. Press Shift+left bracket ( [ ) to make the brush edges softer, or Shift+right bracket ( ] ) to make them harder.

I'm going to paint along the top and sides of my image to hide the glow effect from those areas and bring back the detail in the background:

If we look at the layer mask thumbnail in the Layers panel, we can see exactly where we've painted with black:

For areas where you simply want to reduce the intensity of the glow, not remove it completely, paint with your brush set to a lower opacity. You'll find the Opacity option in the Options Bar at the top of the screen. I'm going to lower my brush opacity down to 50%:

I want to bring back a subtle amount of detail in the bride's dress along the bottom of the photo, so I'll paint over it with my brush set to 50% opacity. This blends the effect in with the original image rather than removing it entirely:

I also want to reduce the glow effect in the straps of the bride's dress, and I think her teeth are starting to look too much like a toothpaste commercial, so I'll paint over those areas with my 50% opacity brush as well. If you want a better view of exactly where you've painted on the layer mask, hold down your Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) key and click directly on the layer mask thumbnail in the Layers panel. This will allow you to view the layer mask itself in the document window. Here, we can see the areas along the top of the photo where I painted with black. The lighter gray areas are where I painted with my brush opacity set to 50%:

Switch back to the normal document view mode by once again holding down Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) and clicking on the layer mask thumbnail in the Layers panel. And with that, we're done! Here is my final "high key glow effect" result:

And there we have it!

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