How to lighten color without ruining texture and line in photoshop?

Question

I'm looking to do something like this:

The areas that are "sunlit" are bright but still maintain the texture and line of the darker layers. How was this done? Is it some sort of blend mode? I have tried everything. If you could help me out, I would really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Answer 1

Yes you can achieve that with blending modes.

I'll show you a quick example by adding some extra lit areas around the window...

First, on a new layer, I block in some color in the areas I want lit. I used a solid shape for the lower area and radial gradients around the actual window:

I then set the layer blending mode to "Soft Light":

There is no hard-and-fast rule here. You can get similar results with the "Overlay" blending mode, and it's worth playing with opacity levels as well as blending modes.

In reality, with an illustration like this, you would most likely hand paint a lot of the areas rather than only using solid shapes like I did and use a larger palette of colors.

Related reading:

• Quick Tip: Painting With Layer Blend Modes in Adobe Photoshop: A nice quick article about painting with blending modes (highlights/shadows etc.) in Photoshop

• David Revoy — Painting with blending modes: A great video about painting with blending modes. Uses Krita but the concept is exactly the same.

• Photoshop Blend Modes Explained: A good general explanation of blending modes in Photoshop.

Answer 2

I'll start by switching to Lab color mode because then all of our contrast (texture) exists in the lightness channel safe from our color.

Now for light say from the other window I would do a circular marquee and apply a Curve adjustment to it. Then raise the Lightness channel a bit and then go to the B channel and pull it towards the Yellows:

Then we can just go onto the Mask and add a feather to it

Then we can use do the same thing with a polygon lasso or pen tool or whatever to create the beam coming towards the ground

Now the sun would get brighter when it hits a surface (the floor) so we'll want to do some sort of masked curve on that too. To keep things simple I'll just another ellipse marquee:

And after using that for a curve and adjusting it and doing the feather and such we get something like so

And without the panels and such covering it:

But really I don't think a circle would form around that window if the light is coming in so strongly through it so lowering the opacity of that curve to almost nothing for:

Of course I don't know how light would come in from two sides of the house either but maybe this pretend world has two suns :D