Iceland Aurora Photographic

Exposure is a critical element in photography. Until recently it was common practice for landscape photographers to slightly underexpose image to increase highlight detail and increase saturation. But there is a new school of thought which suggests over exposing just short of blowing out the highlights will actually give you a better range of colours.

This tutorial looks at ways to convert your image to black and white using the tools available in Photoshop CS3. There may be work-arounds for other versions of photoshop or other image editors, but the work horse in this tutorial is the powerful ‘Black and White Tool’ in CS3 which has a great selection of filter pre-sets. To emulate this without the tool, you could try blending channel levels.

This is a quick and simple technique for correcting the colour of an image in photoshop. It is not always successful and will not give you the desired results 100% of the time. But as it is quick and easy it is definitely one to try first.

This tutorial offers an alternative to the saturation option when you wish to dramatically boost the colours in an image. We will make a photoshop action for this colour boosting technique so that it  can be applied easily to any image in the future. More information about creating an action can be found here.

Hyperfocal distance is the art in photography of achieving as much sharpness as possible throughout the image. In other words, it involves careful focusing adjustments to ensure that objects close to the camera and objects in the distance all have the same sharp focus, but more accurately, the hyperfocal distance is that point of focus where things are in focus from a point half way between you and the focal point all the way onward to infinity. Hyper-focal distance is more of a landscape photographer’s concept. When shooting landscapes, I never use auto-focus.

Layers and Masks 2 – Adjustment Layers

Like layers, curve adjustments is a way of adjusting the brightness/ darkness levels in an image. The emphasis is put more on contrast and adjusting curves is a very smooth and sophisticated way of adjusting contrast.

Basic Adjustments – Levels

When you adjust levels, you are adjusting the range of the brightness/ darkness levels in an image.  This is determined through a histogram. The histogram displays the distribution of the different light value in an image. For example, a dark image would have a lot of value at the dark end of the spectrum (left hand side of the histogram), a bright image would have a lot of values at the bright end (right hand side).

Layers and Masks 1 – The Layers Palette

For this guide you need to have Photoshop open with an image and be able to see the ‘Layers’ palette.