Branson, over at My Reflection of Something, has recently relaunched the Edit Me challenge! Ashley…Plus 3 was previously hosting this challenge (although I never had a chance to participate – sorry!). I thought with the relaunch of Edit Me, I would jump in…especially since there are prizes! AND, Ashley is the first judge for the challenge. Here is her photo for this week:
First of all, thanks Ashley for providing us all with such a beautiful image. It has such potential! Much like I do with any of my edits, I brought this shot into Adobe Camera Raw. I quickly determined that I would need to run two ACR adjustments: the first would recreate the skyline in the background and the second would tackle the details in the foreground.
In order to do this, you need to choose which one you’re going to work on…make the adjustments, open in Photoshop, save a copy and then reopen your file (at least that’s how I do it). Once I had two copies of the file, I treated one (the background version) as a layer and copy/pasted it onto my foreground image. I then used a layer mask to paint on the background. I hope that makes sense.
From that point forward, I created several adjustment layers:
- Levels Adjustment
- Brightness/Contrast Adjustment
- Color Balance (adding a little more blue/cyan to the sky)
- Gradient Map Layer, Soft Light Blending Mode, 20% opacity
- Curves Adjustment
Now, I could have left the image alone, but I felt like it was screaming for vintage processing so I continued with three Kim Klassen textures: Yesteryear, Luminous and #6 (from the Everyday Ben collection). What do you think?
Check out more edits at My Reflection of Something. Be sure to enter your own edit for a chance to win a camera bag pin. And, don’t forget to come back tomorrow for Week 19, Part 2 of Shoot and Edit. We’ll be talking about the cloning and healing tools!
