Working again with photographs, keep in mind that many of the principals you see here can be applied to color correction work in video.This time out we will create rich golden colors giving the impression of a warm morning. I took this photograph in Tuscany in 2005, late in an afternoon.
My goal was to really bring to life the warm colors of the region. So, my first modification was to apply a photo filter adjustment layer with 100% using Soft Light.
You can see by using soft light we have the added benefit of really deepening the blacks as well. Next, I wanted to add in some golden sun rays. I pulled a stock layer I had, rotating it to the correct degree and using Hard light at 76% opacity. I then duplicated the layer...
and applied a mask I generated by adjusting levels on a copy of the green channel...
...painting out the black and white areas with a brush and turned its opacity down to 37% so that not all of the light rays would be obscured by the gate.
I needed to control the amount of bloom I was getting from the rays so create a new adjustment layer with this levels command set to Multiply.
Resulting in more believable rays.
I recognized that on its own, this image was lacking interest, a focal point. Looking through my archives I pulled this image that I had taken in Strasbourg a few years later...
To extract this fellow, because the background was complicated and varied I had to manually use the pen tool. I then placed him in my working document and scaled him to the correct size, applied the same mask used earlier for the sun rays to place him behind the gate and applied a smart filter gaussian blur of only .3
I then adjusted his brightness...
and balanced his color to match the scene...
As you can see there is an additional mesh on the gate. The only way of creating this mesh in front of the subject was to draw one by hand using the pencil tool and masking it with the man himself and applying a gaussian blur to match.
Nearing the end, I wanted the light rays to add more punch so I applied another adjustment layer to just the end of the tunnel...
...and did some further tweaking to enrich the lower portion of this area...
All that was left was to add a shadow for the man...
And the image was complete.
As always, please have a look at my gallery and by all means contact me if you'd like to see any particular image "dissected".
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