Practical Photoshop February 2023

Adaptive Presets are fairly new to Photoshop, yet they can quickly transform both your photos, and your photo editing workflow for good. There are two default sets to choose from in Camera Raw and Lightroom: Adaptive Sky and Adaptive Subject. They add AI masking tech to presets, so you can quickly target and boost a sky or subject with a single click. For enhancing landscapes, they’re a real game-changer… 01 OPEN THE IMAGE IN CAMERA RAW First, open an image into Camera Raw (right-click an image in Bridge and select Open In Camera Raw from the pop-up menu to open either a raw or a JPEG). Begin by making any basic changes you like to the tones. Here we’ve used the White Balance eyedropper to correct the cool color cast by clicking…

Luminosity Masking is an popular but fairly advanced editing technique for isolating specific parts of the tonal range, which then allows you to alter the brightness or colors in these areas. Traditionally it often involves complex channel selections – but for newcomers to the technique, there’s a far simpler method that lets you zero in on different ranges of luminosity with minimal fuss. Let’s take a look… 01 LAUNCH COLOR RANGE Open your landscape image in Photoshop, then go to Select > Color Range. In the dropdown at the top you’ll find options to select Highlights, Midtones or Shadows. To help you see exactly what’s included in each selection, go to Selection Preview and set it to Black Matte. 02 TARGET THE HIGHLIGHTS We’ll edit the highlights here, so choose Highlights from the dropdown,…

This is a simple trick, but it can be very useful if you need to level out a wonky horizon or add space to a sky. Photoshop’s Crop Tool features a handy Content-Aware button in the tool settings at the top, which lets you crop outside of the original image frame. The tool will generate new pixels to fill in the area. Of course, it’s most effective when the fill area is fairly simple, like adding a bit of extra sky or foliage around the edges of the frame. Here it lets us expand the sky and the snow to give the composition a little more room to breathe.…

Sky replacement in Photoshop has become so easy that anybody can do it in a few seconds (just go to Edit > Sky Replacement, choose a new sky, and experiment with settings). The real skill lies in choosing the right sky, then positioning it so that it looks natural (you can drag the sky to move it around within the command, and alter the scale to resize it). There are so many examples out there of terrible sky replacement – and, unless you want your landscape to join those ranks, you need to take care over the details. The most obvious give-away is the sun. If it’s in the wrong part of the sky, the replacement will not work. So if the shadows are falling to the right in the foreground,…

This is a really simple trick that can help to give landscapes a softer, more atmospheric quality. Simply lift the black point so that there are no completely black pixels in the image. This opens up the shadows, and reduces contrast in the deepest tones. You can matte the blacks easily with the Curves command in Photoshop or the Curves Panel in Camera Raw and Lightroom. The bottom-left point on the diagonal curve line controls the blacks: lift this up slightly to set a lighter black point.…

Selective lightening, darkening and localized contrast adjustments are essential tricks for enhancing the parts of the scene that matter most. There are lots of tools that allow you to do this, from the Dodge and Burn tools to Adjustment Layers and masks. But one of the simplest methods also proves to be one of the most effective. Click the New Layer icon to make a new empty layer, then set the Blending Mode to Soft Light. Grab the Brush Tool and press D to set your colors to black and white, then press 1 for 10% opacity. Paint with black to darken areas down, or white to lighten them (press X to swap between the two).…