Hi everybody, this is Craig Tanner for The Mindful Eye and The Daily Critique. Today’s image was submitted by Linda who is an intermediate photographer from Alaska. Linda shot this in Willow, Alaska with Mt. Denali in the background. She said since the first snowfall she’d been waiting to shoot this image because she felt like it’d make a great black and white landscape shot. She really wanted the viewer to get the sense of just how big Denali is in the background even though its hundreds of miles away. And she used a Canon 50 D 70-200 zoom and an effective focal length of 160 mm at ISO 100, stop down to F 8 and exposed the file for 160th of a second. And under questions incomings Linda says she uses Photoshops, she has three but she’s not much more than a beginner with the software she’d love to have some editing tips that would help her make the mountain pop-out more from the sky.
Let’s get right into it here; one of the first things that I love about this image is just the way Linda has used a combination of leading line and a long telephoto lens to connect the town here to Denali looming in the background. I love her idea and I love the way that she’s pulled that off. I’m also really enjoying the framing in the lower part of the image. It’s very dynamic, this is sort of on a third in the image and it brings this out in a very dynamic way. Then, I love the way these two sides of the image play off of each other. There’s a strong sense of balance that’s isometric which is particularly powerful in a rectangular framed image. I love the small bit of a dark guard well here, longer part here, there’s a lot more information over here and a lot more things. There’s not as much information over here but the information that’s here is higher contrast and more graphic. It’s a really classic way of plying two things off of each other that are different in different ways. And the ways that they’re different end up creating a real nice balance between the tow.
I also love the moment with the passenger car going into the wilderness, EMS vehicle coming out, that can create all kinds of narrative and story in the viewer’s mind. I love the dynamic relationship in the moment between these two vehicles. It’s continuing to push the feeling of everything having a great sense of movement. I also love how the beautiful towns Linda has in the lower part of the image. I love the high contrast of black and white and this bottom part, this has beautiful local contrast almost seems like an edging, another thing I’ll mention here real quick is just the moment on the road. Its not the overall shape of the road, it’s also the rhythm of this ribbon effect with light, dark, and light and dark because of the ice and the snow.
Let’s get into the part of this image that Linda wants to change which is to make the mountain s pop more, right now there’s very contrast back here. The truth is, I sort of like this variation. At one time the telephoto and the composition is suggesting the mountains are looming but within kind of ghosted, it sorts of creates the feeling that maybe a lot of atmosphere and a lot of distance but if we wanted to push this in another direction, here’s how we might do it. Please hear me say there are so many different ways to do things in Photoshop and this is just sort of my take on it.
I don’t like using selections very much to make changes like the changes I’m about to make because I ferl like that starts to push people in the direction of create unnatural transitions. It just sorts of create problems, you then have to try and feather out or fix. I like to use adjustment layers and layer mask, and I’ll show you how I would do this.
I’m going to do Apple J, control J on a PC just it was good photocopy in my background, I'm going to go to curbs and I'm going to make the sampling tool active here and I'm going to figure out where these tones are on the curb because one of the first things I want to do is I get more form and more local contrast in the flank of mountain. All these values are up here on the curb, I want to find sort of the darkest area up in here and it’s somewhere right in there.
So, I'm going to go ahead and sample this part on the curb and I'm going to pull down very hard and then I don’t want to just make those areas darker I want to preserve contrast and I'm going to do that by grabbing the very top of the curb and steepening the curb to create a feeling of sort of the difference between the exposed rock and add illuminance in snow. I'm going to go ahead and make the mask active. I want to apply this change locally so I'm going to do apple delete, control delete on the PC, fill the mask with black, white’s my foreground color, I'm going to go to zero hardness in the brush so the brush is totally feathered and I'm going to start at a very low opacity. Let's just say 70%.
I'm going to first bias some areas now, where I'm painting with white I'm going to start to apply that curve changes. I'm going to bias some areas that are already have a feeling of form. I don’t want to miss an opportunity to make this even more dynamic in the way that I apply it. So instead of just grabbing a medium sized brush, I'm painting on these areas on first biasing some areas. We’re not going to do all these work, what if this is going to be printed, I might come in and really and really detailed with this. I'm going to bias these areas and then I'm going to grab a bigger brush and I'm just using the bracket keys, left and right bracket to make it bigger. Now, I'm going to come in and paint and watch what I'm doing here, I'm avoiding the top part of the mountain. I'm going to show you why I'm doing that in just a second.
This might look a little bit unnatural but for right now I'm just worried about the lower part of the image and I'm just creating in a subtle way building up that contrast and creating the feeling of more form which is going to make the mountains come forward a little bit in the composition. I'm also going to go ahead and make a more dramatic base for the mountains. I will help them pop too. I'm going to click here, and then hold down the shift key and click over here and make lines straight across on that adjustment layer mask and apply that change. I'm going to keep working in there.
Now, I'm going to go create another curves adjustment and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to try and make more pop between the sky and the mountains. I'm going to sample the sky and this time because I'm really just concerned sort of just pulling straight down on this area on the curve and making it darker. I'm going to click within the image which I can do in C S 4 and pull down. Watch what happens, because I didn’t touch the top of the mountain with my brush before and this change I'm now going to create some nice pop between the sky and the mountain. If I had darkened the whole mountain down, then I wouldn’t have as much contrast now.
Another part of this work is thinking ahead when you’re sort of building mask and stuff. I'm going to click on the mask, I'm going to do Apple delete or control delete and apply this locally. I'm going to get it in even lower opacity because I'm painting in an area now that’s very homogenous and it’s easy to create effects that are unnatural in their transition. I'm going to get a bigger brush now and please hear me say that the corners are not going to be perfect because we are not on full screen mode and I really wouldn’t need to pull the brush out all the way to make the corners perfect.
I'm going to go ahead and bias the corner right off of the bat and the top of the image just a little bit with a little bit of a vignetting mask just sort of a classic move and classical printing to contain the eye. I'm just doing that biasing and now I'm going to start to come in and apply this change. You can see that I'm building this up very slowly and I'm just going to forget about those corners because I can’t pull the brush out far enough. We’ll just leave those but you’re going to see what’s going to happen now in the way that I apply this change.
Watch how I'm going to mostly paint with the brush above the top of the mountains. There is zero hardness on the brush, is going to feather out and blend across the top part of the mountain with the earlier curves adjustment layer that we applied and notice that I'm just doing this work and building I up very, very slowly. I'm not creating any problems for myself, I'm building towards what I want in a subtle way and I don’t have to go back and start to try and soften things or back out of it. I could just keep going here, just continuing the feather and this is what we’ve done so far and then at this point I'm starting to get a lot more tone back there in the background.
Now, what I'm might do is something I’ll do quite a bit in a situation like this. I'm going to levels adjustment, I'm going to set it to true white point in this image and I'm going to come in and add a bunch of low end black to give a feeling of a lot more pop back there. Again, fill the mask with black Alt delete or control delete again with a very low opacity on the brush, zero harness on the brush.
First, I'm going to come down in here and bias some of these areas towards a little bit more local pop and contrast and then I'm going to go back up to the top part of the image. If I was going to print this, I might come in here and get a smaller brush and really work on some of these areas to just create a more of a dynamic feeling of form and movement.
I'm going to go ahead and get a bigger brush now and again just come in all the way across the top, create even more contrast. How far you wanted to go with this would just be a matter of personal taste but hopefully this helps Linda and helps some other people in terms of applying changes like this and making them appear seamless. I mean here’s what our mask look like, they’re very, very subtle in terms of their transitions, even this local work that we did in here because we’re always feathering. This is where we started and this is where we ended up like I said it’s just a matter of taste is to how far we wanted to push this. We could’ve kept applying curves in our levels adjustments or other things to the image.
I want to say a huge thank you to Linda, beautiful landscape shot, and big thank you to her for sharing this image with us on The Mindful Eye’s daily critique.
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