More Photo Corrections

Dodge and Burn

Once again, I have this great image of the foliage, but it just isn't quite right. In this case, the haze in front of the mountain has caused the colors to appear washed out and very blah. To correct this, I first turned to my good friend the color select tool. By applying this tool to the color of the framing trees with a moderate fuzziness, I was able to create a marquee that isolated the trees from the hill. Using this selection, I created a layer mask on a copied layer of the original image. This allowed me to only change the pixels of the hill, without altering the foreground trees, which were unaffected by the haze. This process was literally burning off the fog.

This is my first time seeing it on this computer monitor (my laptop has Photoshop on it, the desktop is easier type on, though), it looks like I may have gone a little bit overboard with the burn tool. Not to worry! I can always go back and lighten the pixels up again with the dodge tool. Worst case, I can always scrap the layer and start over, as I made all of my alterations on a copy rather than destroying the original.

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Filters

There are a couple of filters in use on this image. The first is an overlaid Highpass filter. The original image was a little blurry, and sharpen wouldn't touch it. One way to correct this type of issue involves an underused filter called Highpass. Start by making a copy of your original layer. Set this copy to Overlay and then head up to the filters menu. At the very bottom of the list, under Other, you'll find Highpass. This filter sets the fill of your layer to 50% gray (invisible in overlay mode) and highlights the edges of your subjects, the amount of which is varied pixel settings in the dialogue. When this layer is applied over the original, it creates the illusion of sharpening the focus.

Once this was done, I went into the sketch filters. I ended up settling on the Charcoal filter after playing with the settings for a while. After applying this filter on a copied layer, I masked out the edges of my subjects using the Quick Mask tool. This allowed me to very quickly create a layer mask that isolated them. made a new layer copy, copied the mask over, and played with the opacity settings and a few effects until I achieved this stylized image.

I created this image by playing around with the distort filters. I started with the sunset image. On a new layer, I created a circular marquee, which I filled with white and adjusted down to an opacity of 20%. This was the start of the crystal ball. I then used some brush strokes on new layers, white in the top left and black in the bottom right, to create the sphere shadowing. These brush strokes were a little heavy, though, a problem rectified by applying a Gaussian blur to the offending layers. This diffuses the contents of the layer outward, much like stretching a rubber band. This also has the added effect of making the pixels transparent, making the shadows much more subtle.

Once I had the sphere in place, I reselected the circle layer, created a new marquee from the layer, and created a copy of the sunset area inside the marquee. To this new layer I applied the spherize filter, found under Distort. The only thing left to do was add the background shadowing and a little lighting. The former was accomplished with layer effects, the latter utilized the Lighting Effects filter, found under Render.