How To: Use the solarize filter to darken and enrich a texture or image

by Janice on Nov.18, 2008, under How To's

Have you ever taken a photo, or found an image or texture that you like, but that is washed out and a little bit flat … And you would like to make it a little more dramatic, increase the tonal depth and contrast – or, on the case of a texture, make it dark and brooding for a grungy background? Without having to mess around with histograms and curves…

Well, I was having a play with the filters yesterday, and came across a combination involving the solarize filter that quickly does just the job…

There are several ways of changing an image in Photoshop to do this. One way is to play with the histogram and curves adjustments (menu – Image – Adjustments – ‘levels’ & ‘curves’) – However, it is possible to loose quite a lot of tonal information and depth from the image. Also, each image needs to be adjusted individually.

What I discovered yesterday is a simple couple of steps that can easily be made into an action to be repeated later, on other images. It creates a similar result on any image, though it works best on lighter washed out images, with darker images just getting darker and harder to see (unless that is the look you want of course!!).

Here are the steps involved:

Open new file
Duplicate the background layer (right-click (or control+left-click with a 1-button mouse) – duplicate layer…
Solarize the new layer (Menu bar – Filter – Stylize – Solarize). – This inverts the lighter half of the tonal range of the image, making the lightest parts nearly black and the near-mid-tones stay nearly the same, with the darker half of the tones remaining unchanged…

Change the blending mode of the new layer to ‘Difference’

Difference reacts to the differences between the upper and lower layer pixels. Large differences lighten the color, and small differences darken the color.(Northlite Designs)

enjoy!

Adding other enhancements afterward:

You can play with the opacity of the top layer to change how much effect the layer has.
You can add adjustments layers with subtle changes that won’t remove too much info (moving the midtone grey arrow a touch towards the black/dark end on the example above gave it an extra glow in the lighter areas).
You can add a mask to keep certain areas of the original unchanged (in the cat example below I added a mask to the eyes and nose.)

Some other tutorials from around the web that use or demonstrate solarization:

This one, on www.photoshopessentials.com, uses the solarize filter as 1 step of many to create a light burst special effect for text.
This one, from hyperninja.com, skips the filter and shows you how to use a curves layer to solarize an image of a ninja.
This one, from www.insidegraphics.com, Shows you how to use the filter to create a neon sign effect on text / linework.
This one, from www.teresalunt.com, uses the filter as the 1st step of several to create a changed colour schema for an image.