hello I'm Robin Whalley welcome to Lenscraft in this third in my mini series of
photo editing workflows in the first video we look to this image and
assessing the changes we'd need to make to it in the second video we looked at
the raw conversion process using capture one I'll put the links to the previous
videos in the information below in this video we're going to be looking at the
editing that I would typically undertake with tools such as Photoshop or the Nik
collection for this particular image I want to use the Nik collection now if
you don't have the Nik collection and you don't want to pay for it you can
still get an older version of the Nik collection for free I'll put the details
to a tutorial explaining how to do this in the video information back to our
image and let's look at the changes we want to make so at the moment we've
opened up the contrast in the image and we've also got rather a pinky hue to it
from the adjustments we made I'm now going to correct those in the Nik
collection I'll start by duplicating my background layer
and I'll call this Nik adjustments I'll note
this for use with smart objects now the reason I do this is so that when I
applied the Nik collection adjustments if I decide I want to change them again
later I can reopen them and adjust them
further if I applied them to a regular adjustment layer that wouldn't happen
and I had effectively baked the adjustments into that layer
I'll start by picking the color effects Pro filter now that opened just gives me
a warning message that I'm working in a smart object so I understand I'm okay
with that and the first thing I want to do is use
this Pro contrast filter I tend to start with this wherever I've got a color cast
in the image like this one even when I've introduced the color cast and what
I want to do is use this correct color cast slider we have up here if I move it
over to the right you can see how it takes all the color cast out and even
goes as far as to introduce an opposing color cast now I don't want to remove
all the color casts from the image what I want to try and do is neutralise the
Greens here so that they don't appear purple and that seems to have given me a
reasonable start on the image if I turn the filter off and on you can see
unfortunately each remove the color casts from the sky and from the header
so what I want to do now is remove the effect of this filter in some of these
areas and I can do that using the control points so here I've got a
negative control point if I add that to the Heather what we see is that the
color comes back in on that area so now I can add in an adjustment over
this side so that we keep the color on that Heather and we'll add the
adjustment point into the sky make it quite large and then I'll duplicate it
across the other areas so all I have to do is hold down my Alt key and click
and that just duplicates the control point that I'm using now if I turn this
on and off you can see that the effect is still being retained in some of these
areas but not in the others if I want to just strengthen that effect if I add a
normal control point here so plus control point and I'll add it to the
ground here you can see that it's knocking out the color cast in that area
and again we'll do this on the distant Hills because I want to retain the blue
color in those now in this area I'd like it to still be a little bit orange so
what I'll do is I'll just reduce the opacity of that control point to
reintroduce a little bit of the color and again I'll do the same here
so if I turn that off and turn it back on you can see the effect it's hard
overall on the image next I want to adjust the contrast in this area and the
whale do that is with the pro contrast filter because these from dynamic
contrast slider is really really good but first I'm going to add a completely
new Pro contrast adjustment and the reason I do that is because I want to
apply it to different areas than the first one
so now I can introduce my dynamic contrast and notice how that picks up
the highlights in the Heather and I'll also introduce just a little bit more
contrast now what I don't want to do is introduce all that contrast adjustments
in the upper half of the image I want to retain it down in this bottom part so
this time I'm going to add a plus control point so that I can select the
Heather and adjust that again I'll just duplicate that onto the of the side here
and that's looking quite good and I'll just duplicate it again and add it to
the path if we want to see the areas that are being covered all I have to do
is highlight the control points there I can see that it's actually selecting
some areas of the sky and I'm going to use a negative control point just to
remove those out the reason I don't want the adjustment in the sky is it tends to
highlight and exaggerate noise that might be there and I want the sky to be
relatively clean gain just duplicate across holding down my Alt key I'm happy
with that we'll turn off the
masks and there's the adjustment that's it off
that's it back on it's looking quite good no I'm going to add another filter
and this time I'm going to add the brilliance and warmth filter and I'm
going to use that to try to reintroduce some brilliance or warmth back into my
image in the Heather and I also boost the saturation or the perceptual
saturation in those areas so if I select a control point again I can now add that
back in in the Heather and again I'll select this side as well just
duplicating control points reasonably happy with that increase our perceptual
saturation see if we increase that no it's not too far keep the adjustments
quite subtle so that's it off that's it back on can't see too much of a
difference at the moment just let's make it a little bit stronger yeah that's
about the look I want I'm now happy with those adjustments
so I'll click OK and we'll return to Photoshop so if I turn
I turn it back on you can see the difference we've made it's subtle but it
works well and makes the image appear much more natural so what we're doing
here is we're correcting selectively the adjustments that we made in the raw
converter the raw converter processing was intended to give us a good starting
point to do the other adjustments now we're going to use for Vader as well
again I've got the warning message that I'm working on a smart object this time
I'm going to make selective adjustments to the sky to warm it up and I'm going
to enhance further the heather in the foreground I'll start with the sky I'm
going to no so legs the area in the clouds that's quite orange and pink
already know the reason you saw the mask then is I was holding down my command
key and if you resize a control point or you move a control point around while
you've got the command key held down you see the mask of what it's selecting this
time then I want to warm that area up you can see the warmth there being added
end and I'm just gonna boost the saturation very slightly and that looks
sufficient to make it a little bit more appealing so there you can see the
difference no I'm going to select the Heather on again if I hold down my
command key and reposition the control point you can see what's being selected
so that looks quite good I'm just gonna warm it up very slightly I'm going to
add a little bit more contrast in and I'm going to add some saturation now one
thing you can try is adding in a little bit of structure what it tends to do is
pull the highlights out with that little bit more and make them stronger so that
it appears that you've got much more detail in there that looks quite good on
that site so I'm just going to no copy my control point and make sure I've got
it selecting other areas of Heather that I want to enhance and that's know
looking quite good the other thing I might want to do is reduce the
brightness because again that can tend to really saturate some of the colors in
this header but I don't want to intrude don't want to reduce the brightness too
much or it can make it look a little blocking now I've noticed over here in
the distance the hills become a little bit darker again so I'm going to select
that hold down my command key just so I can see what I'm selecting and now I'll
open the shadows slightly and that tends to open up the hills in the distance and
I'll also reduce the contrast very slightly as well
so let's check the overall preview that was the starting image that we got out
of the color effects and no that's the adjustment that we've got and if you put
them side by side you can see that it's a big improvement so we are moving now
nearer to what we wanted to see from the finished image with the Nik collection
so let's just check the effect back in Photoshop now so that was what we got
out of capture one that's what we've got out of the Nik
collection and don't worry if it appears too saturated at this moment what we're
going to do later is pull the saturation back once we've added special effects
and the special effects section is the next part of the workflow video so
that's video for special effects I'm Robin Whalley you've been watching
Lenscraft I'll see you in the next video to look at how we finish this
image