But hopefully I understand that if we were working on this image to front tip, we would be at 100% a lot of times and we’ll be going a lot slower.
And the most basic sense is what I’m going to do. I’m going to add a layer mask, and I’m going to paint with the brush tool. I’m going to get a bigger brush. I always like to be at when most of the time when I’m correcting a mask I like to be at hardness of 0%, and now what I’m going to do with the soft brush, a little bit of a bigger brush is I’m going to pick an opacity using numbers such a short cut of 10%, and I’m going to paint back in a little bit of yellow, and I’m going to do that to sort of mimic this ellipse of light.
So here we go. I’m just going to basically, come in here and add a little bit of yellow and it’s very subtle, so it’s building up very slowly and the edges are really soft. And I’m just trying to create a movement of color and try to mimic the filling of the flow of light. This is a warm light source at this point, and where it’s brightest in the image.
I’m going to cut the opacity down even more here. I’m going to go to five percent just kind of feather a little bit more yellow around these edges, and now if we click on the mask you can see how subtle this is. I’m going to option click on the mask so we can see it very, very subtle, and now here’s the blending that we’ve done. Let me actually click shift on the mask. So you can see that we’ve just brought in a little bit of yellow from the file that’s underneath, okay.
And what are the other things that Mike wanted to do? You wanted to bring out some contrast in the sky. Here’s what’s really interesting because we brought out color contrast by blending this to white balance conversions. There’s actually a lot more contrast up there in the sky now because contrast and a color file is not just value. It’s also the way colors play off of with each other, but we can push that even a little bit more. I want to bring the shadows down here and here’s how would do the shadows in this case. I could make some kind of overall correction and then paint on the mask. This is so particular that I would rather just go ahead and make the change as I’m painting.
So I’m going to go ahead and add a blank layer. I’m going to go to luminosity blending mode which means that I’m going to be affecting value when I do the work that I do. I’m going to make black my foreground color. I’m going to grab the brush tool. I’m going to make a brush that’s about the size of the different shadows that I want to work on. And I’m going to use an opacity of five percent, a very low opacity here.
I’m going to click on the line, and then I’m going to go to the end of the line and hold down the shift key. And I’m going to paint in those shadows and again, if I was doing this a bit of 100%. I’m doing this on a rough way so it’s not perfect, but we can slow down a little bit more. I'm just using this technique to do a great job of bringing all the shadows out in a very particular way and a controlled way, and obviously we could do this again. We could have started at 10% and then played around with opacity on the layer to dole it back or we can add a layer mask and adjust from there.
But we’re just going to bring all of these up this much, and I’m just going to go ahead and do all this real quickly here and let’s say there’s one other area right in here that I want to bring up a little bit. We’ll paint it like that. Well, I’m in here doing this I could add a little bit of vignetting in here and I might do that, so just add a little bit more filling of black and kind of rounding this off at the bottom. The top is already pretty dark I might even come into these areas in here, and paying a little bit like that, so here’s what we’ve done on that layer.
And the other thing that I might do to this image, let’s just do two more quick things and see how it looks. I want to bring up this saturation and the blues up here. I’m going to grab the hand here, so I can sample. You can see that I’m getting the blues and then bring up to saturation in that create a little bit more color contrast between the eyeball on and off to see what we’ve done. I’d do like that and then I’m going to do something else here at the end.
When I did this conversion and open this way up you’ve got rid of that heavy yellow and open the whole thing up, so here’s what I’m going to do. I want to go to curves and I’m going to darken the image overall a sort of the exception of the middle of the image. And watch how I do this. Watch what happens here. I’m going to look at where most of the pixels are and if I want to make all that darker, watch what I’m going to do. I’m going to pull down right there at the edge of the majority of the pixels, and I’m looking at contrast as I’m doing that and pulling right there on the curve.
I’m really liking what’s happening with the contrast as the image is getting darker if I didn’t then I would need to go above and below the curve and straighten that area out to preserve my contrast, but I like what’s happening with contrast, and so I’m just going to go ahead click there on the mask like black in my background color, do an apple delete or control delete to fill the mask.
I’m going to go to the brush tool. I’m going to go to an opacity of 20% and basically now just going to paint in everywhere dark, moving towards the middle, and then I create more of a filling similar to what we had in the beginning. We’re looking at this image and I’m just trying to create more of a filling you can see that more of the filling is sort of light radiating from the middle here. Let’s see what’s happening. Yes, and I like that filling right there. I might keep going a little bit.
The other thing that I might do from here if I kept playing with this is get a little bit of more blue into these areas, so here’s where we started. See where is it? Right here, here’s where we started and here is where we ended up. It could still stand to come down a little bit darker anyway, beautiful image.
I love what Mike says about the shooting a ton of shots here. I can That really resonates with me as a landscape photographer when something is this beautiful and this dramatically, Mike’s done a beautiful job of getting the back light, keeping the sun from blowing out too much, working to beautiful juxtapose ideas, the radius kind of the sun and all the emanating lines of light and then the linear fillings of all the other ideas in the image, really beautiful landscape shot.
We want to thank Mike for submitting this image to The Mindful Eyes Daily Critique, see you tomorrow everybody.
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