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:
- Download this original landscape photo he took by clicking here…
- Do your own version of improving, enhancing and otherwise putting “wow” into this image
- Put up a post on your blog displaying your enhanced photo, and explaining what you did
- Come back to this post, and enter your photo and blog post on the Thumbnail Linky
- 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 decided for my revision, I would step away from the actions and work with curves, levels and other basic adjustment layers.
- 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.
Anyways, I thought I’d share this one with you today.
Have a great day everyone!
