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Step 26 - HDR Comparison
Here is an HDR version of the original image. HDR treatment actually did nothing for the colors of this image, only tried to bring a unified luminocity to the whole image with a good mid tone contrast. The clouds are far inferior to our treatment, but it provided us with a little more ground detail, thing that we could use in our image, but nothing some Sharpness and Midtone contrast could not achieve for our image as well. Also, the method used by ACR, Curves and Channel Light Masks, brought the original colors of the image to show, only by treating it's exposure dynamics properly.
Step 27 - Color Enhancing - Hills
It's time to start enhancing the colors of this image. Open a Color Balance Adjustment and set the Midtone and Shadows Greens to +25 and +10 accordingly. Adding Green looks good for this Hill. Select the Color Balance 1 Mask, press ctrl+I (PC) or cmd+I (Mac) to invert the mask, pick the brush tool, select a round brush (size depends on the use, use "]" and "[" to change the size) white color, in a medium opacity (40%) and 0 Hardness and start painting the mountains along with other green details on the ground. Finally apply a Gaussian Filter on the Mask (80 to 100 radius on a 22 mpixel image, less in smaller images) to even the edges out. If this is too Green then set the layer opacity a bit lower, 50% or 75%. I set mine to 56%.
Step 28 - Color Enhancing - Clouds
Because it was a sunset we will add some Red and Orange to the Clouds to give an even more dramatic look to them. Open a second Color Balance tool, set the Shadows to -12R, -8G, +1B, Midtones to +30R, 0G, -17B, and highlights to +24R, 0G, -61B (!!). Intense values are used to present the effect even better. Since none of the methods used is destructive to the image, everything can be undone simply by erasing the adjustment layer. Similarly to the previous step, select the same brush as before and paint over the clouds in the inverted mask. Finally apply a Gaussian Blur to the Mask.
Step 29 - Color Enhancing - Ground
Choosing to bring more life to the ground as well, we open a third Color Balance Adjustment and set the values Midotes R+15 G+5 B-17 and Highlights R+12 G0 B-65. We invert the mask and use the same brush to paint over the ground area, appy Gaussian blur and adjust opacity of the Layer.
10 comments on “Amazing Landscapes using Adobe Camera Raw and Adobe Photoshop”
Wow, this one seems real easy. I am going to save this for future photos that I am editing.
I am having the same problem as Josh in step 20. Can this be achieved without shortcuts? Perhaps they have changed with new versions (I am using CS6 on Windows)
The selection must be active when you press the backspace, otherwise the fill button appear. (I've cc 2014 and work great)
........also you must work on a new\copy layer, and not with the background layer.
On step 20, when I hit the backspace button, I get the fill menu. It does not darken the greyscale. What exactly should the backspace button do in this instance. Is this function somewhere else in PS that backspace is just a shortcut to?
helpful one .. thanks :)
Why don't I get the options "Fill light" and "Recovery"?
I'v gotten lost on the masking process, i followed your steps meticulously, but achieved a big fail. I need a more dumbed-down instruction for the masking, something is missing here.`
Up until step 21 I was going great, I'm using Photoshop CS5 and every time I try to "select Channel Alpha 2 to create a levels 2" i get "Warning: No pixels are more than 50% selected. The selection edges will not be visible."
I was having this problem too, but I FINALLY figured it out. The key is in Step 20: "With the selection still loaded, select Channel Alpha 2 and press
Backspace once. Select Channel Alpha 3 and press Backspace twice then
select Channel Alpha 4 and press Backspace 3 times. When you are done,
your created Alpha channels should look like this, every next one a
little bit lighter that the previous one."
Once I read that and noticed my Alpha channels were getting DARKER with each deletion, I double-checked my foreground and background color. You'll want black as foreground and white as background. Hope this helps!