Adding impact to landscapes

[ericc]

Back when people on DPR Pentax SLR Talk still talked about photography technique, there was a short thread that probably most everyone missed because the angst started a day or two later. That thread is here...

Ssshhh ... Pro's Photoshop secrets revealed

I took what I could from his delivery (it wasn't exactly clear) and came up with the following Photoshop Action. Put it in your Photoshop directory under "Presets/Photoshop Actions" and then restart PS. It should be available under the actions palette (with History).

http://ericcloninger.com/albums/exe/...scapePunch.atn

It's not perfect by any means, but it's a good start to a workflow involving landscapes. Most of the work is done in layers, which is good. You can adjust the levels of the work done in Selective Color, which does the bulk of the work. I interpreted his instructions of "some", and "a little" to arbitrary values of -10, -5, +5, +10, etc. The Hue/Saturation layer is there but does nothing unless you change it. H/S is such a personal thing that my processing skills aren't up to the task of computing the optimal H/S. Also, the Brightness/Contrast layer does a tiny amount of work, but you can remove that as the scene dictates or adjust the sliders accordingly.

One of the steps involves bumping the luminence with the Match Color function, which does pixel manipulation, so I duplicate the background layer instead of working with the original. I think you will need to operate on a flattened image to make this work.

I'm not a Photoshop workflow expert, so there may be better ways to do this. I recorded this with CS2, I don't know if it will work with CS1 or PS7. FWIW, there are a lot of really useful PS actions at ActionCentral.

[doggydude]

Doesn't matter to me whether this works or not, requires some tweaking or not.

The fact that you made it and steppe dup to share it openly should be applauded - excellent work!

Duane

...now, where's the power switch for my photoshop...? That's the one with the light over the door, right?

[clarenceclose]

Looked at the cousin's website. Pretty intense image color. Thanks, will want to try this later, when we have some color besides white in our landscape.

[ericc]

Originally Posted by clarenceclose

Looked at the cousin's website. Pretty intense image color. Thanks, will want to try this later, when we have some color besides white in our landscape.

Yes, it is rather postcardy. That's why I interpreted his statements of "some" and "a little" rather conservatively. I originally played with larger values, but the saturation was just too much to be believed. It's a start and it saves me some time when I'm processing in bulk. YMMV, of course.

[roscot]

Thanks Eric,
I'll have to give this a try.
-Alan

[joele]

Thanks eric, will have a look...

[BrendanPK]

Cool, but I find that shooting with Slide film (esp Velvia 50 [rated at 40] and Agfa Chrome RSX50 [not sold anymore]) can do very simular results
Digitals great but I still Love film

[roy]

here's a little simple action i put together. it converts to lab and adjusts curves in the A&B channels. at the end of the acion you get a really saturated rgb layer that you adjust the opacity before flattening.