Unfortunately the weather and time of day have a lot to do with how your outdoor photos are going to come out. Landscapes are something I find incredibly challenging, just because of the lack of control you have over all these elements. When you go on a trip, on vacation, or wherever you are at the moment, you pretty much are at the mercy of nature. There are certain educated guesses you can make by planning what time of day you might shoot according to the direction of the sun, and it’s height in the sky, but when the clouds or fog start to roll in it’s an entirely different story. Here is a Photoshop video tutorial by our good buddy Bob that shows how you can repair these types of hazy images in post processing. Using lab color mode, and later switching back to rgb, you can maintain control of adding too much extra artifacting. Here we learn how to use the curves on the lightness channel, as well as on a, and b by moving the little points around. I have to be honest, this stuff was greek to me until I watched the video. It ended up being a very simple and to the point technique which I find myself using more and more in my daily workflow. The beauty of Photoshop as I always say, is that there are so many roads to the same outcome, so sit back and enjoy this one. I’m sure you’re going to find it very useful to remove haze, increase saturation and mid to low level contast. The results might actually impress you; a lot. They did for me, on an image that I just processed of Flamenco beach.
Here Bob explains how to creatively use exposure adjustment layers to add highlights and subtle lighting effects to your photos. This feature was originally implemented in the CS3 version of Adobe Photoshop. Amazingly what he describes as “subtlety” here makes an incredible improvement over the original image. If you enjoy this tutorial, click the tutorials category to the right of this post for more creative digital goodness.
In this Photoshop video tutorial Bob “The Miz” Mizerek shows how we can replace skies and clouds in our photos quickly and easily. There are a lot of methods to doing this, as I have posted earlier. That is the beauty of post processing – it’s similar to programming or web development, where there are 100 ways of doing anything. You just need to stick to what works best for you. It still never hurts to pick up a few pointers on how to do something a different way, because you never know; you might just find the new way faster or easier. This video shows how to use the “blend if” or the blending if option.
Here Bob “The Miz” Mizerek shows us how we can simulate reflections quickly and easily in this Photoshop video tutorial. Creating realistic reflections can be challenging, but this tut will send you in the right direction towards mastering the technique.
A quick and painless demonstration of wrinkle removal using some tools in Photoshop. I apologize for the fact that it sounds like the mic was inside of my mouth…
