Tip 11: Landscape Retouching (beg/int)

Landscapes aren't particularly hard to Photoshop, as really there is minimal work to be done, unlike portraiture. Well it depends if you are creating an image from a number of pictures, but I dont do this because it seems kind of deceitful to the viewer.

Anyway this will be a quick and easy tute on how I Photoshop my landscapes. I don't use it on every landscape, of course, but it is good for enhancing the colours in sunsets.

step one: open your image, I took this one earlier tonight.


Pretty ok, but the colours are kind of washed out (I like to overexpose a little so to get detail in the ground). A grad filter would enhance the sky colour, but what about the water? So to fix this duplicate the layer, and Gaussian blur this layer, at about 20. Then set this layer to soft light. I get something looking like this.


If you are pressed for time, you can leave it like this, or add a simple curves adjustment. But I will continue because thats one thing I got plenty of, time ! Anyway. I dont like the blurred vegetation so add a layer mask (the rectangle like box below your layers) and paint away with a black brush. See tip #7 for a simple tutorial on how to use masks. If you are not familiar with layers, simply erase away the blurred vegetation. Keep the brush and eraser to an opacity of 30-40% or so so you dont go too far. When you are happy with the result, add a curve adjustment layer (the circle thing next to the rectangle below curves) and add more contrast to your image to pop the colours. This tends to darken the vegetation so again I add a mask and paint away the part of the land I dont want too dark.


This is basically it, but if you are really a perfectionist like me, press CTRL+ALT+shift+e to make a new merged layer. Then go to filter>other>high pass and set this to about 5 and set this layer to soft light. This is a sharpened layer. You can reduce the opacity of this layer if its too sharp, and if you only want to sharpen the vegetation, again mask out the sky. This is the end result.



Very basic really. You may want to tweak the colours a little, maybe add a vignetting layer (filter>distort>lens correction>vignette darken), maybe try a texture layer if you want (see tip #8 for using textures). But thats basically it!