Letting an image edit itself
Mixing and matching
The following example shows how we mix blending modes with “normal” techniques. A reasonable rule of thumb is that if a blend mode edit doesn’t get you where you want to be fairly quickly, and it’s not a masking issue—an edit that needs to be localized to a specific area in the image—it’s probably time to go back to the “normal” Photoshop tools.
The image shown in Figure 1 is an unadjusted scan from a Kodak Portra 160 NC color negative. Two quick blend mode edits put it into a much better state for the subsequent fine-tuning.
Figure 1: Heavy tonal lifting with blend modes
Two Curves layers, one set to Hard Light, the other set to Screen, quickly remap the tonal values in this image. Making extreme edits like these with Curves or Levels introduces hue shifts that may cause problems down the road.
Next, we shift the color balance—the image has a colorcast that’s basically cyan, as is common with scans from color negative. So we add red as a solid Color Fill layer, setting it to Color blend mode and 12-percent opacity. Then we go in and fine-tune the color (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: Fixing color balance with a Color Fill layer
We add a red Color Fill layer, set the blend mode to Color, and reduce the opacity to 12 percent. Then we double-click on the layer’s icon to open the color picker, and fine-tune the color.
The Color Fill layer generally moves the color balance in the direction we want, but it’s clear that the sky is going to need a localized correction. The blue sky is relatively easy to isolate, but we need to be careful, because the dark areas on the background hills are also blue, so we’ll need to take that into account when we make the selection.
We’re also faced with the question of how to edit the sky color. We could use a Hue/Saturation layer, or a Curves layer, or we could apply another solid-color layer set to Color blending. They all require approximately the same amount of work, but we opt for a solid-color layer because it’s likely to be the easiest of the three to fine-tune afterwards.
If we used a Hue/Saturation layer or a Curves layer, we’d almost certainly apply it at 100-percent opacity, so if we needed to make the effect stronger, we’d have to tunnel into the dialog boxes. Color Fill layers, on the other hand, always use fairly low opacities, so we have an immediately available adjustment to make them weaker or stronger using the layer opacity—we only need to open the dialog box to adjust the actual color.
So we make a marquee selection that covers the sky blue areas, then refine it with Color Range. We add a Color Fill layer with a sky-blue color. The layer automatically uses the selection as a layer mask, so we set the blend mode to Color and reduce the opacity until it looks right, as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3: A local correction with a Color Fill layer
We use Color Range to select the sky, then add a blue Color Fill layer. We set the blend mode to Color and reduce the opacity to 12 percent to produce the result in the bottom image.
There is, however, the danger of falling in love with the techniques to the extent that you make extra work for yourself by overlooking the more conventional techniques—we learned this the hard way!
We want to make the background hills less blue (the dark areas are green vegetation), and we want to increase the saturation and the separation of the red and yellow tones in the foreground. We could do this with careful masking and two or three color fill layers, but since we’re dealing with separate ranges of color, and we already have a mask that isolates the blue sky from the blue hills, it makes more sense to use a “conventional” Hue/Saturation layer with the blue sky masked out.
We start by Command-clicking on the Sky color layer’s layer mask in the Layers palette to load it as a selection, then we press Command-Shift-I to invert the selection, leaving everything except the blue sky selected. When we add our Hue/Saturation layer, it automatically uses this selection as its layer mask.
We boost the saturation of the foreground yellows, and shift the hue of the background hills towards green. We have to darken the green to keep the same tonality, so we reduce the lightness as well as shift the hue—see Figure 4.
Our next problem is that the clouds are too cyan. They’re relatively easy to select, so the simplest fix is a masked Color Fill layer using red to counteract the cyan cast. (Hue/Saturation doesn’t work well on colors that are close to neutral, and Curves would require quite a lot of fiddling—we’d need to adjust at least two points on the red curve, and possibly tweak green and blue too.) Figure 5 shows the fix.
Figure 4: local correction with a Hue/Saturation layer
We load the layer mask from our previous edit as a selection, then invert the selection so that the sky is masked rather than revealed. We click in the foreground of the image to center the Yellows color range on the foreground yellows and boost the saturation. Then we switch to the Blues tab, click on the background hills to center the color range, and make a major adjustment to both Hue and Lightness.
Figure 5: Warming the clouds with a Color Fill layer
We make a quick Color Range selection of the clouds, then add a red Color Fill layer. We set the blend mode to Color and reduce the opacity to 30 percent to produce the result below.
Two simple blend mode edits let us adjust the final lightness and contrast. We add a Screen layer and a Soft Light layer, setting the opacities to 7 percent and 62 percent respectively. The Screen layer at 7 percent opacity provides a very gentle lightening, and the Soft Light layer at 62 percent gives a healthy contrast boost—see Figure 6.
Figure 6: Tonal fine-tuning with blend modes
Two Curves layers, one set to Hard Light, the other set to Screen, quickly remap the tonal values in this image.
One of the biggest problems in digital imaging is knowing when the image is finished! We can’t claim to do better than anyone else in that department, so we have two more edits. The first is to make the foreground a little warmer—we really want it to glow. We could use a Photo Filter layer, but we find Color Fill layers easier to control—there’s one fewer dialog box to tunnel into if we need to tweak the color.
So we apply an amber warming color as a solid Color Fill layer, set the blend mode to Color, and reduce the layer opacity to 12 percent. This does wonders for the foreground but makes the clouds much too warm. So we select the Background layer, make a quick Color Range selection on the clouds, select the warming layer’s layer mask, and fill the selection with black. (We had to target the background layer to make the Color Range selection because Color Range only works on layers that contain pixels, a quirk that has tripped us up more than once!) Figure 7 shows the image with the Color Fill layer applied, before and after masking.
Figure 7: Warming with a Color Fill layer
We apply a warming color as a Color Fill layer, then mask the clouds using Color Range.
At this point, most of us would have the sense to leave well enough alone—we’ve come a long way since Figure 1—but the background hills aren’t quite right, so we apply the Curves shown in Figure 8, invert the layer mask, and paint the final correction in with a soft-edged brush.
Figure 8: A masked Curves correction
We apply a Curves layer with the above Curves, then we invert the layer mask, and paint the correction in with a soft-edged brush.
Where to go from here
For more information about Photoshop CS2 and photo editing techniques, check out the following articles:
- Work efficiently between Creative Suite applications, by Total Training
- Wrap up distortion quickly using image warp presets in Photoshop CS2, by Steve Caplin
- Adjustment layer basics, by Bruce Fraser and David Blatner
- Basic photo corrections in Photoshop CS2, excerpted from Adobe Photoshop CS2 Classroom in a Book
