Building light and shade can change the focus for landscape images immensely
and Boris FX Optics has a wide number of tools
to help you do this easily
In this shot I'm going to start
in the Film Lab category
and apply a vintage color 2 strip to change the mood immediately
and I'll just find a preset
and I like how that one looks
I'm now going to build up light so I'm adding a new layer
come to my light category
and I'll use the light filter to add a dappled Gobo onto this scene
Adding displacement lets it fit more easily into the scene
I'll duplicate this layer and add it to the other side
and I'll just add a couple of variations
to place more focus on the house let me add a spotlight
so I'll add a new layer and spotlight
I can move the light into place using the on-screen widget
and at these default values the effect is a little bit too strong
so let me take the ambient value up
and the brightness of the light down
now we're going to need to balance this light with some shade
and the grads and tint category has a ton of filters to bring color
into our image
but I just want the sky a little bit darker
so let's hit up an ND gradient and I can use the on-screen controls
just to move that into place as well
I can blend any layer with different Blend or apply modes here
so if I try something like soft light and maybe knock the opacity back a little bit
we're getting a slightly more contrasty look
but the whole image is using the soft light blend
not just the ND gradient
so to limit it further every layer can contain masks
I'm going to click up here add a mask and choose gradient mask
I'll position the gradient mask in around about the same place
as I did the ND filter so we're mainly affecting the sky
and we take a look at the before and after
we're just adding a little bit of depth to the top
now one of the last touches I always give is a little bit of extra color push
just to tie everything together
so I'm going to head back into film lab
and really some of my favorite effects are found in this category
including film stocks
there are so many presets to choose from you can actually just click your way through
until you find something you like
now one little trick I like to do is to swap the layer blend mode again
maybe again to something like overlay or soft light
and then knock that opacity back maybe to about 50 to start with
and now this this adds contrast and color without completely taking over the original image
I can sort of still move through these and get a feeling of something
that I want I fancy
something a little bit green and blue
so maybe I'll come back to Corpse Bride
just add a little bit more mood into the image
I could also exclude things with masks so if we come up and I create a spot mask
I can position this over the building and take the feathering down a little bit
and then I can just invert it with this button up here
and turn off the overlays at the top of the viewer here
maybe add a little bit more softness
and finally I can try to draw the eye by adding a last bit of shading
so in the color category I can use something like Haze
which is usually added to create a bit of contrast and cut through Haze
but I can use this along with some masks
to draw the viewer's eye
and I'll start with a path mask along the path
remembering of course to turn my overlays back on again
as before I'll just invert that and add a bit of softness
I'll drag the building mask up to be able to use it again
and we can blend it together using the buttons up in the top right hand corner
this is usually easier to see if we show the mask
so let's turn the invert off and change the blending to subtract
and now we're taking out the building and the path
now if the Shadows are getting too dark I can mask them with a selection mask
so I can go add selection let's turn on the mask again
no drawing's involved here
it just creates a mask based off the image
I'll keep it at luminance but I'll make my selection position to zero
so it's just focused on the shadows
and I'm going to tweak that range up a little bit
and to see this properly
let's subtract it as we did before
let's just take the opacity off of that layer just a little bit
as you can see in a short amount of time
I've used light and shade to add a different flavor to this image
and help to draw focus to the building
and we can even take this further if we want to
it's easy to layer effects together to enhance light and shade
with Boris FX Optics
to learn more about Optics Subscribe to the Boris FX YouTube channel
or head over to the Boris FX training pages at borisfx.com
where you'll also be able to download a free trial version of Optics