Add dramatic effects to landscape photos later

The waves hit the rocks, filmed in Spanish San Sebastian Photography: Chris Tennant

"Use a variety of tools to adjust a picture to get the right tone."

Sometimes, after filming the beautiful scenery, the actual effect of the picture is gray, let people disappointed. Can the problem be corrected by increasing the contrast alone?

Simply adjusting the contrast is obviously not going to work. Excessive contrast and grey are not bad results. The key question is how to adjust accurately and maintain a moderate balance.

Usually, there is a way to work: using a variety of software to process an image, and ultimately achieve our desired effect. All kinds of software have different ways of dealing with hue and contrast, and many adjustments can be made to create a picture that retains both the authenticity of the original scene and the dramatic improvement.

First step

Start with the basic raw adjustment first. Open Lightroom (This example uses version 4), bring up the lens correction panel (Lens corrections), select the "Enable Profile corrections" option to correct lens optical distortion. Then bring up the camera correction panel (Camera calibration) to correct the color of the picture. We chose the preset settings, in this case we chose camera landscape, which is "landscape" (see, depending on the type of photo, you can choose a different preset, such as portrait, nature, etc.). Finally, using cutting tools and straightening tools, the level of sea level is corrected.

Second Step

Make global adjustments. The most obvious approach is to use the Contrast slider to enhance photo contrast in Lightroom's basic tools panel. When adjusting, pay attention to the histogram, avoid cutting off the high light and shadow parts of the details.

The detail is retained after enhanced contrast (set to +25 in this example), weakening highlights (Highlights-25), and enhancing Shadows (Shadows +25). In order to improve the contrast of the midtones, we can improve the sharpness (Clarity +25).

Be sure to use each adjustment slider sparingly to avoid loss of detail and prepare for further adjustments.

Third Step

Import the image into Photoshop CS6 (or cc). For any image, global contrast adjustment and bias correction are the most critical. This step will complete these two pieces of work. First, create a new level adjustment layer, and then individually adjust each color channel (R, G, B) to achieve accurate color deviation and contrast correction. If handled properly, the hue and spread of the image will be refreshed.

Fourth Step

After the global adjustment is complete, you need to adjust the specific local. Use a simple masking mask to make local corrections. In this picture, the shadow area of the rock is a bit too dark to use a leveling layer to reduce the darkness: Create a blank layer, fill with 50% grayscale (edit-fill). Change the layer blending mode to "soft light". Then, use the soft white brush (set transparency to 10%), paint the specific parts of the rock, and gradually lighten the shadows. Conversely, if you want to increase the shadow of a part, change the brush color to black, the same way to paint.

Fifth Step

Use Photoshop's Nik ' s Color efex Pro 4 plugin to further adjust. The plug-in's contrast control is particularly good, it can be a separate highlight, midtones, adjust the shadow to achieve finer results. The filter is used to increase the light and intermediate 30% respectively, which increases the detail and texture of the impinging spray part. In order to avoid this adjustment affects the sky part, where the white clouds if the high detail, will make the picture appears not natural. So, we add a mask layer (layer-layer mask-hide all) and brush the waves with a white pen.

Sixth step

Carry out the final finishing work. First, in order for viewers and eyes to focus on the middle of the screen, you should add a bit of dramatic elements to the photo, such as a moderate dark angle--there are many ways to use it, not the focus of this article, no longer mentioned. Finally, you should sharpen the picture globally. First use the Stain healing brush tool to fine-tune the image, and then use the smart sharpen filter to sharpen the entire picture.

Category:

• PS Image Processing
• PS Post-processing tutorial