Mood-Altering Adjustment Layers in Photoshop
This entry was posted on Nov 18 2008
Adjusting levels, saturation and other settings in Photoshop can have a dramatic effect on the mood of an image. Take the image below, for example. What you see is a standard landscape photo of Paynes Prairie in late fall. The lush greenery is becoming dying brownery, accented with patches of yellow flowers. The sky is overcast with no defined cloud patterns. Overall, a pretty plain photo, aside from being shot through a fence. Nice, but plain.
I like Paynes Prairie, though, and I want to save this photo somehow. Photoshop holds the key. It holds many keys, but I’m going to use only a few this time around. Via the magic and awesomeness of adjustment layers, I’ll take the ordinary photo above and turn it into something moody and dark. The same could be done to make it happy and light, but I’m going in the other direction (which some might even call drab and plain!). The beauty of using adjustment layers is that you alter the photo’s appearance without altering the original photographic layer.
Open the photo in Photoshop and crop it to your liking. Using this cropped selection, add an adjustment layer to take out most of the color – in this case, everything except yellow – by going to “Layer->New Adjustment Layer->Hue/Saturation.” Take all colors down via the Saturation slider to their lowest value, then increase the yellow slider a bit to make the flowers pop more. You should have a semi-desaturated image at this point.
Next, add another adjustment layer for level adjustment by going to “Layer->New Adjustment Layer->Curves…” (or adding a Levels… layer). Adjust the levels to your liking. There are endless possibilities with this setting, just like the saturation layer, so don’t be afriad to play around with multiple variations. It comes down to personal preference.
To finish this off, we want to bring those clouds up a bit more, since there’s really no definition in the gray, overcast sky. This can be easily done with the burn tool. Make sure to burn the highlights, midtones and shadows in order to achieve maximum effect.
Now sit back and enjoy your creation!
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to “Mood-Altering Adjustment Layers in Photoshop”
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Ya know what.. I just may try this out today. Thanks for the bit o’ inspiration.
Chica´s last blog post: Revisiting old photos of the Pen
Hmmmm….interesting.
Showed my daughter (of course) and she liked it. She especially liked the way you used the burn feature and the saturation (to make the yellow “pop”).
Nice job.
soapbox mom´s last blog post: Fall Leaves