How to Work on a scenic photograph in Photoshop

How to Work on a scenic photograph in Photoshop Alright, so we’re back again, here’s another Photoshop tutorial from nobsphotosuccess.com. You know I’m just going to show you a few ways just to bring up your vacation snapshots to the next level. You know whenever I go on vacation, I always have my camera on me/ I always have at least one camera if not just my point shoot, you know my Canon or and a lens but what I’ve looking for is I always just at least try to get a good capture of an image. I try to get at least all the elements that I want, good composition, good color tone, good exposure, you know and sometimes it’s just not right and enhance it afterwards but really when I’m shooting stuff like this, we’re on a crop shoot, I’m just looking again at a good image and that’s was something that I could play with later on. Now I knew when I took this, I was really impressed with this green algae that formed on the rock so then I knew that when I got this back home that I could probably bring this up and really enhance it so that it really stands out and I underexposed it a bit because I want to expose for the sky. I wanted to get the green in there and I know the sun was kind of peaking through the clouds. Everyone has given this nice backlight right here. So, I knew that when I was in Photoshop that I was going to bring this green up to another level and really get a nice saturate so it really stood out of the image and I had this picture in my head, you know, green pinstripe to match the color of the algae and te black matte and you know it really stand out so that’s exactly what I got to do here now. So first thing again, filter, sharpen, unsharp mask. You should know this by now, I was going to go 20, 60. Alright and now I want to bring up the foreground a bit more. I do find it a bit dark so what I’m going to do is I’m going to drag this layer in my layer’s palette, drag it down to duplicate it and I’m just going to change the blood mount to screen and that’s just going to lighten everything up. You see now, I’ve got a lot more in here. Now I’m just going to erase back my clouds because I still want my clouds to be the same so I’ll actually just going to go with my big eraser tool and you know what? I’m going to do just down here just a bit, perfect. So actually, now you can see that, that’s all I have left. I’ve just brightened up just that part right there and if I wanted too I can always just duplicate that layer again, just keep on going whenever I want. You know what? Let’s just leave it like that. Now I’m selecting on the top layer. I’m just going to press CTRL-E, just to merge down again and I’m going to press CTRL-E again. Now I’m going to do the opposites instead of brightening up, I’m going to darken it down so I’m going to duplicate that layer again and I'm going to multiply. I got nice, dark clouds but I’ve lost all my foreground so I’m just going to erase away my foreground. Go on, let’s just get some more detail in here, perfect, just like that. So as you can see, all I’ve done was just darken the clouds a bit and let’s just bring that back in 100%, perfect. There we go. Now, few things I can do to increase the green, I can always just go in to my hue, saturation, take green, I’ll just beef up that saturation a bit but you know what, let me just see if I want to maybe change the colors a bit. I’m going to go back into my hue, saturation, I’m just going to take red and I’m going to choose the Add to the eye dropper. Actually, you know what? I’d first think, let’s just restart this. I’m just going into here, choose red and I’m going to click on the green and what this does is this shows me the level of green within this area so I’ve gone all the way from my light orange all the way into the green wall, just take these two triangles, just take these layers and bring them in together. Now, nothing has changed on the image but if I take my hue and I actually increase it, at least now, you can start seeing the changes in here. See the blue here? Now I’m going to add my eye dropper and I’m just going to click on all the green that’s in here and the reason you increase the hue is just so you can actually see what you are changing. So there, now you can see that I’ve got all the blue. It’s actually going to be affected so now if I go into my hue, I can actually play with just that. So I can actually change this to whatever color I choose but I’m going to stick with green right now. Let’s just see what else we got here. I can always make it a nice or maybe I’ll play with this later but I am just going to take the green. I’m actually just going to increase the hue just a bit more just to get a little bit more vibrant green and then I’m just going to increase the saturation even more just like that, perfect. So we’ve gone from that to that just popping it up ever so lightly. Now if I wanted to even cheat this even more I had an idea. If I wanted to get this a little bit more green, I can simply just choose my eye dropper, pick the green, take my paint brush to it, put it on color and if I go 100%, look at that, see? Now I just added more algae to my rocks. Now I wasn’t planning on doing this but you know what, now that I’ve done it, well I’ll just have fun with this, cheated even more, perfect just like that. Now, as a few things I can do here, I can leave it like that but you know I always like to play when I’m in Photoshop. So you know what I’m going to do, I’m actually going to run my contrast soft action on it. Let’s just see what happens. So here we are, contrast is off, got a rip and you know what? I kind of like the way that’s blurred out here. I'm going to keep that. I’m going to hit OK but I’ve mode out my clouds so I’m actually going to take the top layer and I’m actually going to erase back my original clouds I have in here just like that if you wanted to, there you go, perfect. Flatten it and you know what? I’m just going to burn down ever so lightly, perfect. Now I noticed that this hot spot, I’m not really in particular keen on because my eye keeps going to it so I’m going to take my old magnetic glass old tool and I’m just going to make a selection around it. I’m actually just going to clone a big swathe of cloud over there and in the rock we’ll do the same thing, there we go. Alright, now I still have the green that was in here. Let’s just take a background color black and let’s add a pinstripe on to that so into canvas size, let’s go .0, let’s go 0.1, make sure you press the “X” to change it to foreground/background color, there we go. Now into the background color which is going to be black, let’s go 2 and 2, now, let’s go 4 and 4, perfect just like that. And you know what? And there you have it. I’ll take that any day. So we’ve gone from that, let’s see if we got that in here. We’ve got some of that to that, beautiful. I hope you enjoyed just another way to enhance what’s already there. Remember, if you get good capture, good exposure, good white balance and 99% percent of the battle is already won.