The Creative's Corner

Now it’s time to make the final adjustments. As before, the adjustments you need to make will vary with each image. These adjustments can be very time-consuming, depending on the image and how the image will be used. Making an image for a blog post, like I did here, took me about an hour. To make a fine art print of this image would probably take me another hour or two.

1. Open the image in Photoshop, and create a Black Point. This is the first step in adjusting the global contrast. To do this, make a Curves Adjustment layer, then go to Image/Adjustment/Threshold and adjust the slider in the window that opens until only a few small black spots are seen. Hold down the Shift key and click on a black point that you think is the darkest black in the image. Now delete the Curves Adjustment layer (the target will still be marked). Finally, create a Curves Adjustment layer above the background layer, set blending mode to Luminosity, then use the black eye dropper and click on the point marked by the target you just created. Now you have the Black Point set.
2. Now you want to adjust the Global Color Balance. There are several ways to do this, but here’s my favorite. Create a Levels Adjustment layer. From the drop down menu, select each color channel, one at a time. For each color, if the histogram doesn’t go all the way to the right and/or left, drag the arrows until they are at the edge of the histogram. This gets rid of the empty space on the histogram. Once you have done this for each of the three colors, you have corrected the Global Color Balance.
3. Next I created a Levels Adjustment layer. I moved the arrows until I had the blacks, whites and gray where I wanted it.
4. I wanted to adjust the highlights in the snow-covered trees, so I created a Channel Mask of the trees, selecting everything at 50% brightness, and above. I went to the Channels tab, and looked at each channel to decide which one captured the snow covered trees best. I then held down the CTRL key and clicked on the channel. This creates the selection I mentioned. I then went back to the Layers tab, and created a Curves Adjustment layer. This created a mask using the Channel Mask, and I adjusted the curve. In this case, I made a slight “S” curve.
5. I made one more Curve Adjustment layer. This time I wanted to brighten the yellow Aspens, and the Pine trees that had no snow. I repeated the previous step, but this time the adjustment had more of an arch shape, especially towards the top.

I then saved this image, resized it for the blog posts, put on my watermark and I was done. Here’s the image.

It would be nice if every time I went out shooting the weather and lighting were perfect, but that seldom happens. But I can’t complain, because the challenge of Photoshoping an image is a blast. I wouldn’t want to do detailed adjustments on every image, but for images like this it’s a lot of fun, and keeps my Photoshop skills sharp.

Have Fun,
Jeff