August 26, 2010
Categories: Photography Tags:
The Great Outdoors
Last night, I came across yet another challenge. Brent Riggs recently took a trip to Colorado and thought he’d offer a challenge and reward for all of those who participated. Here’s the deal:
  1. Download this original landscape photo he took by clicking here…
  2. Do your own version of improving, enhancing and otherwise putting “wow” into this image
  3. Put up a post on your blog displaying your enhanced photo, and explaining what you did
  4. Come back to this post, and enter your photo and blog post on the Thumbnail Linky 
  5. Then, Brent Riggs will do a private online demonstration of what he does to get his outdoor photography to come alive, and send a link to every person who participated by following these instructions and entered the Thumbnail Linky list.
I thought this might be a great way to get some tips, tricks and/or secrets from an expert…so I decided to play along. Here is the original image: 
I decided for my revision, I would step away from the actions and work with curves, levels and other basic adjustment layers.
Landscape Revision
  • I started in Adobe Camera Raw making a slight exposure adjustment and adding a little more black to the photo…as well as adjusting the brightness and contrast. 
  • I then brought it over to Photoshop Elements and did two curves adjustments. In the first adjustment, I was adjusting the whole photo. I went back to do a second curves adjustment with the intent to bring out the blue in the sky – I used a layer mask to focus only on that section of the photo. 
  • I then opened my levels and adjusted the main levels as well as my red, blue and green levels to really get the right coloring (if I’m honest, I think I kept going back and adjusting these).  
  • I also went into my saturation and pulled down the yellows and blues (the mountains were looking too purple). 
  • For POP, I created a duplicate layer of my background, ran a high pass filter and set the blending mode to soft light and lowered the opacity a little bit. 
  • I’m pretty sure I also went over the grass to desaturate a little (it was even brighter).
  • I finished up by resizing and sharpening as I do with every photo.
If you’d like to produce your own revision, just link up and let me know you participated so that I can give you a little comment love.

Somewhat related, but on a different note…this week’s You Capture theme is: GO OUTSIDE. Our weather has been pretty difficult all week, so the first chance I had to go outside and take any pictures was last night after work. I took a few shots, but I’m only sharing one today (gasp…I know) – I realized that nearly every one of my Photo Hunt items has been shared in some capacity this month, so I needed a few surprises. 

Photobucket
Anyways, I thought I’d share this one with you today. 
IMG_5842 blog
Have a great day everyone!
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