Photoshop tutorial

I’m back this time with a quick ‘n dirty color enhancing Photoshop CS2 tutorial.
In a previous post I wrote about tools and the importance to learn them and how they increase our creative potential. One thing that is cool about learning the creative tools is that there is always a different way to accomplish tasks, whatever they are. And it couldn’t be different with Photoshop CS2.
If you want to retouch an image or apply warm filter to it, or completely modify the hues and saturation, go ahead and choose your own way to do it. But to do so, you must understand how the tools work within the application.
I’m always interested in learning new things and I found that Lynda.com is the best way.
If you do not know Lynda.com yet, visit this link and get a 7-day free trial account signup. Once you’ve signed up, choose how you want to learn: by subject, product, vendor or author. Lynda has a HUGE library and a team of professionals that might suit your purposes.

If you are interested in follow this tutorial, download the file home_landscape.jpg. Let’s go.

1. Open home_landscape.jpg. I took this picture from my apartment in Rio de Janeiro on a bright sunshine day.

2. On the layers pallete, create a photo filter adjustment layer.

3. Choose warming filter (85) and dial the slider to a 50% density. Be sure that preserve luminosity is checked and click OK.

4. If you want, change the layer blending mode to soft light to bring some contrast and saturation to the image. Adjust the layer opacity to the desired amount. NOTE: if you want to change the blending mode to soft light you’ll have to increase the photo filter density. To do that, just double-click the layer icon.

5. Click on the white mask thumbnail and turn it to black by pressing command+I on your keyboard. This will mask all the layer. The white mask reveals the image while the black hides it. You will notice that as soon as you invert the mask, the warm filter you’ve just applied is gone. It’s OK, we’re gonna reveal some parts in the next step.

6. Grab a soft round brush. Be sure that the foreground color is white and begin to paint the image. Choose a large size brush, like 1500px for example and paint the areas that you want the warm filter to be revealed. I chose the buildings and trees. To see how your painting is going, alt+click the mask thumbnail; alt+click again return to the image. You can change the opacity of the brush to suit your needs.

7. Now we’re going to put some nice blue in the sky. Create a color balance adjustment layer. Dial the first sliders all the way to the left, to get a nice cyan, and the last slider all the way to the right to get a nice blue or dial them as much as you want. Click OK. You see the image turned to blue and that’s fine. What we’re going to do is we’re going to click on the mask thumbnail and invert it just like we did before with command+I. But this time we won’t get the brush, because we want another cool effect. Grab the gradient tool and be sure that the foreground color is set to black. If it’s not, press D on your keyboard to go to the default settings, black on the foreground and white in the background.

8. Click in the area just above the mountain, in the middle of the image and drag towards the sky. You will notice in the mask thumbnail that you’ve created a gradient fill from black to white, from the bottom to the top of the image. This means that the black part of the gradient will hide the image and the white will reveal it. The grey tones will reveal it partially. What we’ve done is we’ve masked the bottom of the image and preserved the warm filter for the trees, buildings and the mountain while the sky turned to blue.

This is my tutorial debut. Please, share a feedback. I’ll try to do a video tutorial next time. Hope you enjoy it!

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Bye!