North Texas PC User Group

Session 5 – November17,2007

Adobe Photoshop for Landscape Photography

There are many principles that are the same for both people photography and landscape photography. However, there are some things that we will focus on more with landscape photos.

Step 1: Crop

You want to start out with the actual palette that you are going to be working on, and no more. So, first you need to decide how you want to crop. The number one reason to crop is to get the horizon straight. Not having a straight horizon is only acceptable in 2 cases:

1)There is a hill, so the landscape itself is not straight

2)You are skewing the horizon on purpose, in which case it had better be at least 30 degrees skewed or more, so that it is obvious that you did it on purpose.

Incorrect horizon Corrected horizon

Acceptable

Purposeful

Skew

There are two main ways to crop the image properly. I’ll introduce you to the lesser known, but much more functional tool. This tool is called the “measuring tool” or “Ruler” and it is hidden underneath the eyedropper tool

  1. Click on the eyedropper and hold it down, these othertools will pop up.
  2. The measure tool allows you to take the cursor, and click on one point, and then drag a line across the image. Drag this line along whatever it is in the picture that you want to be the straight horizon. I have used this when I photographed people on stairs, and I know that the stairs are perfectly horizontal. You can choose the actual horizon, a houses roof line, whatever you like.
  3. After you have chosen your straight line, go up to the “Edit” menu in Photoshop.
  4. Scroll down to “rotate canvas”. When you click and hold down on this, you get several options. One of the options is “arbitrary” meaning that you are rotating not 90 degrees right or left etc., but an arbitrary number. When you choose this after using the “measure tool”, it will automatically enter in an amount (like 3.12 or something small) which will tell you that in order for your line that you drew to be straight, it must rotate the canvas 3.12 degrees.
  5. Click OK, and this rotation is done for you.

However, you now have a skewed rectangle inside of the rectangular canvas. You must now choose the crop tool to get rid of the awkward edges. I have changed the canvas to red so that you can see what the skew looks like when you rotate the canvas to be horizontal. You must now crop inside of the red/canvas so that you are only seeing the picture, and not any of the blank canvas.

This brings me to the more familiar crop tool. However, we are going to learn some of the more advanced functions of the crop tool. You can do several things with the crop tool. You can:

1) Change the slant

2) Crop to a specific ratio

3)Crop to a specific size

Cropping to correct slanting

If the measure tool is just a little too scary to deal with, there is another less exact method. I am sure everyone here has used the crop tool.

  1. Click on the crop tool
  2. Clear out the width, height, and resolution values in the toolbar boxes near the top of the screen. (Otherwise you would be restricted on how you could crop.)
  3. Drag a rectangle over the whole area of the picture. If you don’t get it right the first time, press <Esc> and try again.
  4. What you may not have known is that when you draw out your crop rectangle, you can now move your cursor near to one of the four corners and choose to rotate what you have cropped. As you move the mouse near the corner look for a “corner” symbol with arrows.
  5. Finally, press the <Enter> key to accept the crop. If you don’t like it you can always press <Ctrl+Z> or <Alt+Ctrl+Z> to undo what you did and try again.

Crop to a specific ratio and size (ie 4x6,5x7,8x10)

These are all slightly different ratios. Your camera by default follows 35mm by shooting to a 4x6 ratio. 4x6 larger is 8x12, not 8x10 though. You have about 1/4th of the long edge to crop off to get the picture to fit correctly into an 8x10 frame. If you would like to choose the crop yourself, instead of letting the lab do it, then you must know how to crop for this size. When you choose the crop command, you have a row of options pop up at the top of the screen. These options allow you to specify:

1)Width

2)Height

3)Resolution

This allows you to specify, for example, “8 height, 10 width at dpi300”. The 8x10 is not always automatically set at inches. Make sure it is not set at “pixels”, or you will get a super tiny piece of abstract art. Looks kinda cool, if that is what you are going for…

If your picture is larger than an 8x10 at 300dpi, then don’t set the resolution – i.e, leave the box blank. Otherwise, you can set the resolution, and this will be a quick way of “interpolating up”. (meaning, resizing a picture to be larger than the original. Not the best thing to do, but it’s necessary sometimes.)

Step 2: Evaluate

So, cropping gets you your basic canvas to begin working with. The next step is to evaluate your photo. This is something that you will continue to do in between each and every step. This is where you need to make decisions:

  1. How are the highlights and shadows? Where are they? Is anything too light, too dark?
  2. How are the colors? Too blah? Too saturated?
  3. What do you want to do all over?
  4. What do you want to do to specific spots.
  5. Areas that need more/less contrast?
  6. Specific colors that you want to bring out?

There are lots of things you may want to change. But some of my favorite things to tweak in a landscape or landscape portrait are:

  1. making the sky bluer
  2. making the grass greener
  3. bringing out different colors in trees (the different shades of green, yellow,etc)
  4. increasing contrast in a patch of grass or trees
  5. vignetting the picture
  6. desaturating certain colors

Step 3: Exposure

Usually, the first thing I begin to tweak is Exposure. This is where we begin to use the information that we have learned the last few weeks. Often, the entire picture has been taken under the same circumstances. However, other times, part of the picture is in bright sunlight, while the other part is in shadow. You should be aware by now how to correct for overall exposure. My preferred method is the levels individual channels method where I tweak the “R” “G” and “B” channels individually. This gets rid of most color casts, as well as fixing overall exposure.

  1. If you have a CS version of Photoshop, create an adjustment layer for levels by picking the circle with the half light/half dark area, and then “Levels” from the pop-up menu.
  2. Or, just press <Ctrl+L> to bring up the Levels adjustment panel.
  3. Then, adjust the separate “Red”, “Green”, and “Blue” channels.

As an alternative to(or in addition to) adjusting the Levels, adjust the “Curves”.

  1. If you have a CS version of Photoshop, create an adjustment layer for curves by picking the circle with the half light/half dark area, and then “Curves” from the pop-up menu.
  2. Or, just press <Ctrl+M> to bring up the Curves adjustment panel.
  3. Then, adjust the separate “Red”, Green”, and “Blue” channels. Click on the curve when you want to place a selector handle and drag the handle where you want it. (To delete a “handle”, drag it off the panel.)

For the most part, the conversion is pretty good. A little more blue than I would like shows up in the mountains, but I like it for the most part.

Sometimes however, the exposure isn’t even.

Take a look at the greenery in the front of the lake. As you can see, it was in a dark shadow before, but looks like it has the same exposure in the second after fixing it. This is where we begin to get complicated. This is where we will begin talking about layers and masks…

This is one of those magical features of Photoshop that makes it so special.

You can work on individual places in an image by using what we call “masks” and “layers”. A layer would be like taking just a portion of the image and copying it, without copying the information that you don’t want. Essentially, when I am working on a layer to just correct the

shadowy parts of the bush, this is what it looks like:

This is the part of the bush that I have corrected. If I were to put this part over the part above it (the uncorrected version), we would see what we see in the corrected version. We wouldn’t see the shadowy part, because the color/exposure corrected part is on top, “masking” it. However, if we were to look at the entire image with the same corrections that the shadowy part has, the image would look like the right image. It is so bright that the lake and the view have turned to white. And the sunlit part of the bush is waaaay too bright!

So, in order to use what I want out of the corrected view, but leave out the overexposed parts that I don’t want to use, I use a “mask”. The mask does exactly what it says. It “masks” the parts of a layer that I don’t want to see while allowing the parts that I do.

You can use masks in two different ways. If you have the full version of Photoshop, you can do the corrections in what is called “adjustment layers”. An adjustment layer has no actual pixel information. It just has information about the pixels that are underneath it.

This is what it looks like to have “adjustment layers”. As you can see, the bottom layer, the background, has the original picture. Whenever you see the actual picture in the icon, this means that there is pixel information. When you don’t see the picture, and you see an icon like the ones to the left, that means that there is no pixel information. There is only information ABOUT the underlying pixels, such as brightness/contrast, color balance, levels, and curves.

However, if you only have Photoshop Elements, then this is not an option. However, do not fear! There is still a way to accomplish the same purpose. The only difference is that when you use “adjustment layers”, there is no increase to the file size. However, when you use layers with actual pixels the file size increases. I’ll show you.

This is what a PhotoshopElements adjustment layer would look like:

  1. First, you would use the lasso tool to draw around the area that needs to be corrected.
  1. Then, you would copy just that part of the canvas by pressing <Ctrl+J. This makes whatever you have selected a new layer of its own.
  2. After doing this, you can now just go up to the Image-Adjustments-curves/hue/levels/whatnot and do the adjustments there on that new layer.

Since the selection you have made is not the final selection that you probably want to show, the next thing you would do is create a mask for that layer to blend in the selected area with the original layer.

  1. To create a mask, click on the icon at the bottom of the layers palette that looks like a white circle in a gray square. This is the Add Layers Mask button.

You will notice a white palette popsin the layer that you were on when you clicked the Add Layers Mask icon. That white canvas is the one that should be selectedwhen you ue the Brush tool to paint with either black or white, or shades of gray. Even though the two canvasses (the one with the new layer, and the blank mask) are side by side, you should think of them as one on top of the other.

  1. Make sure the layer mask is selected
  2. Press the <B> key to select the brush tool.
  3. Make any changes you need to size the brush tool for your picture.
  4. Make sure the foreground color is set to black. This is done in the toolbox icon near the bottom -- it is a black square over a white one or vice versa.
  5. Paint over the area of the picture where you want to remove the layer and reveal the underlying layer.

Thus, when you paint with black on the mask, anything on the layer below it will now be revealed. It is like erasing a part of the top layer to you can see the one behind it.

On the other hand, if you paint with white back on top of the black that you just painted, it will bring back the information that you hid with the black. This is how you will “select” the edges of the area, and make the two exposures look like they were taken in the same picture.

If you have the Photoshop CS, you can create an adjustment layer. It will automatically create the layer mask in the layer.

An easier approach is to select the whole picture instead of just an area. Then, copy the show picture to a new layer. To do this,

  1. Press <Crtl+A> to select all of the picture.
  2. Press <Ctrl+J> to copy the selected area to a new layer.
  3. Adjust this new layer with Curves or Channels or whatever to get the exposure, color , etc. right for the target area you want to correct.
  4. Now, click on the Add Layers Mask to add the mask feature to the layer just created.
  5. Then, repeat steps 3-6 above to selectively erase parts of this new layer and see the one underneath. This will blend the two layers.

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