Create highlights and add shape to an object.There can be many reasons for this. The client loves the shot, but it requires some fixing up to make it more dramatic. There may be wine glasses that require a sparkly sheen to them or a piece of metal or paint requires a shiny look. Care must be taken though, as there are different types of sheen to objects. A very shiny, smooth surface will have a hard, bright shine to it, but an object with a flat, dull finish, like a brushed metal surface, should have a flatter sheen to it.

1. Let’s take a round circle of color, as in the image below. I just created the circle part of the image in Photoshop by filling a circle selection with color.

Before: adding a basic circle of color in Photoshop

2. Once you have the object identified, create a new layer in your file, call it Highlights, and set the layer to normal (default). Create another new layer, set the attributes to multiply and call it Shadows. There are a couple of different highlights and shadows we could draw on this ball to achieve two completely different looks. One could be flat looking, as if the ball were sprayed with a flat paint. Another look could be that of a very shiny ball where the highlights and shadows appear very hard with little diffusion. In the image below, I’ve created a ball with a flat look to it, and in the next image, I’ve created a very shiny ball. Let’s go through the steps to see how each was made.

After: the flat spray paint technique

After: the high-gloss technique

3. If we want the ball to look like it’s been painted with a flat purple spray paint, we’d use soft highlights without any hard edges to them. Using the Paintbrush tool with a very soft hardness setting, like 0%, again set to a very low opacity of 20%, spray on highlights in an area you think would need them, as the image below. Where you brush in highlights will be based on where the light is coming from. Let’s assume the light is coming from the right side of this page, then the highlights on the ball will land on the right side of the ball. Imagining that this is the only light source, the shadows will fall to the left of the ball. I’ve added a shadow on the left side, and the result the image below.

A selection of the ball is made and a white highlight is brushed in