Magical Forest Photo

You will notice that upon clicking on the B&W gradient, the color of your work is now B&W! To apply the contrast change using the Gradient Map, we will change its Blending mode. The simplest way to change the Blending mode is through clicking on the drop-down menu with the text Normal on the layer window.

Let’s change the Blending mode to Luminosity.

Next, let’s apply a Curves adjustment layer. To activate that just press the Create New Fill Layer/Adjustment Layer button and pick Curves from the contextual menu.

When the Curves tool opens, input the following on their respective fields:

• Input: 115
• Output: 135

Now, we will paint light to amplify the mood the forest creates. To do that, let’s first activate our Brush tool (B).

When you have it activated, we will now change its settings to the settings below:

• Brush size: 600px
• Hardness: 0%
• Opacity: 25%
• Flow: 100%

Note: To reduce the Hardness, right click on the image while the Eraser tool (E) is activated, then you’d see the Hardness scale, which is at default – 100%, just move the slider to the left to get 0%.

Also, we would need to change the Brush color. To change it, click on the Foreground Color on the Tools menu to bring up the Color Picker tool.

When the Color Picker tool opens, input the following values to the “#” box: fffdd9

Before we apply the brush, we would need to create a layer first. To do that, just press Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + N and then a box would come out. It will automatically ask you for the layer’s name; let’s name this layer: Light. Now, we’re all set to paint using the Brush tool (B). Use the brush on the region shown on the image below:

The result should be similar to this:

When you’re done, duplicate the layer “Light” by pressing Ctrl/Cmd + J. We duplicated it to increase the effect. Before continuing to the next step, let’s group the layers that we had just created. To group the layers, click on all the layers that we have made and press Ctrl/Cmd + G. After doing that, you’d notice that all the layers are now inside the group. Let’s rename this group to Background. To rename a group, simply click on the words “group 1” (etc) and a text box would appear and you may now rename it.

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