Just realized a quick color grading trick that saved my portfolio piece

I was stuck on a digital painting for 2 weeks because the lighting felt flat no matter what I did. Then I tried slapping a gradient map on a soft light layer and it instantly gave the scene depth I couldn't get with manual blending. Has anyone else used this as a shortcut instead of doing all that tedious brushwork?

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sarah1981mo agoMost Upvoted

Have you seen that one tutorial where they used a gradient map with the layer set to color burn instead? I caught it on some art stream recently and tried it on a forest scene I was working on. It pulled out this warm golden light through the trees that would have taken me forever to paint by hand. The soft light trick is solid too, I use it all the time for character portraits to fake subsurface scattering on skin. Do you ever mess with the blending mode after you apply the map, or do you just stick with soft light?