Table of contents for February 2023 in Practical Photoshop

“Welcome to issue 143 of Practical Photoshop! If you enjoy the issue, why not subscribe and get a whole year for just $19.99?” When it comes to editing landscapes, there are all sorts of tricks of the trade. This issue, we take a look at some of the most useful editig secrets. Elsewhere, discover how to shoot and edit a zoom blend for stunning outdoor photography, and get to grips with the newly improved Healing Tool. www.digitalcameraworld.com…

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.…

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.…

If you want to add a touch of drama to your landscapes, a well-placed bird or two can go a long way. Open the bird image in Photoshop, grab the Object Selection Tool and click on the bird (Shift-click to add other birds to the selection). Go to Select > Select And Mask and increase Radius to improve the selection. Once done, press Cmd/Ctrl+C to copy, then go to your landscape image and press Cmd/Ctrl+V to paste it in. Press Cmd/Ctrl+T, then use the box to resize and rotate the birds into position. For a more cohesive look, press Cmd/Ctrl+L for Levels, then drag the white or black output slider inwards to fade the shadows or highlights.…

1 COMPOSE THE SHOT Focal blending lets us emphasize backdrops by making them larger in the frame. It’s an ideal technique to try when you have a combination of foreground interest and distant scenery. A tripod can help you keep the camera position consistent throughout. 2 ULTRA-WIDE SHOT Take a shot with a wide-angle lens – here we used a 16‑35mm lens at 16mm. Frame to include foreground details that lead the eye towards the distant scenery – we used the trails of foam in the reservoir, shot using a 20-second exposure in the fading light to blur the water. 3 ZOOM IN AND RESHOOT Switch focal lengths and take a closer shot of the distant scenery. If your lens is a zoom, you may be able to simply zoom…

If you’re struggling to include foreground details, distant scenery and sky in the same frame, try shooting a vertical panorama as well as focal length blends. Use a tripod and take a series of horizontal frames. Start with the camera tilted down at your feet, then move it upwards incrementally until you’ve covered both foreground and distance. Overlap each by about half the frame, and refocus on the center each time to record front-to-back sharpness. Combine the frames using a panorama merging feature like the one in Lightroom and Camera Raw.…

Photoshop has many types of layers and adjustment layers available, but there are six that you’ll find you need to use again and again. Learning how they should be used may seem a little daunting for beginners, but once you’ve got to grips with them, you’ll find they play a part in the creative process of almost every image you make. 01 LEVELS This should be the first layer you add to an image, because it fundamentally alters the tonal range of the entire image. Create a Levels Adjustment Layer, drag the Black point slider inwards until it touches the left hand edge of the histogram, and drag the White point slider inwards to the right-hand edge. This remaps the tones of the image to make more of the available…

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…

The Vibrance control in the Basic Panel of Camera Raw and Lightroom allows you to boost the less-saturated colors in a scene. It can be very handy, but for landscapes there might be a better way to enhance color saturation. Head to the Camera Calibration Panel, where you’ll find primary saturation sliders for Red, Green and Blue. Experiment with different levels of saturation to boost the scene. In particular, the Blue Saturation slider can have a wonderful effect on skies.…

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).…

Atmospheric shafts of light through misty scenes can elevate a landscape to another level. In Camera Raw or Lightroom, grab the Brush Tool in the Masking panel and use the] and [keys to resize the brush tip to the smallest point you want your ray of light to be. Click once in the image. Next, use the [key to enlarge the brush tip to the largest size you want, then hold Shift and click on another point. A line will be plotted between the two points that gets incrementally wider. Add more lines in the same way. Once done, try decreasing the Dehaze slider, and increase Exposure and Contrast to add a fog effect to the rays.…

01 PREPARE THE IMAGES Choose the two images you’d like to blend, then open them both into Photoshop (if toning in Lightroom first, ensure both images have identical adjustments). Go to the wider of the two images. Analyze the scene and determine where the easiest join line will be. Here, the dark banks of the lake are ideal. 02 COPY AND POSITION Go to the zoomed-in image, then grab the Move Tool. Drag it to the tab of the other image and then down into the main window to copy it over. Lower the layer opacity to around 50%, then press Cmd/Ctrl+T. Use the bounding box to transform, resize and position the image to fit the scene below. 03 PAINT A MASK Bring the layer opacity back up to 100%.…

The image-editing process begins as soon as you’ve transferred your photos from your memory card to your computer. 1 The first stage is to begin sifting through your pictures to discover which are the keepers. The image organizer that comes with Photoshop is ideal for this task. Adobe Bridge has controls for keywording, rating and filtering your images, and there are handy tools for batch renaming files, creating panoramic stitches, making contact sheets and more. Launch Adobe Bridge and navigate to a folder containing new images. Use the cursor keys to quickly flick through the images and click below a thumbnail to add a star rating, or use the keyboard shortcut Cmd/Ctrl+1-5. You can then filter your photos by the star rating to group the ones you want to work…

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…

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…

The Object Mask Tool in Camera Raw and Lightroom intelligently isolates complex objects for you. All you have to do is either scribble over the object (in paint mode) or drag a box over it (in rectangle mode, which we prefer). Once isolated, you can quickly lighten, darken, boost colors, increase Clarity, and so on. You can also fine-tune the mask by using other tools to lock on to specific areas. Here we’ve used masks to isolate the cliffs, the foliage, the rocks, the gap in the arch and the sky, then made tailored adjustments for each. TAP HERE TO SEE VIDEO…

One of the great joys of landscape photography is finding a scene with a combination of enticing foreground details and beautiful distant scenery. But composing this into a balanced frame can be a challenge. If we use a wide-angle lens to include the foreground details, the exaggerated perspective can make the backdrop disappointingly insignificant in the frame. Our eyes don’t work like ultra-wide-angle lenses (they’re more like a combination of a sharp 50mm in the centre and a blurry 20mm around the edges). So the exaggerated perspective you get with wide angles often feels vastly removed from the experience of gazing upon a place with your own eyes. Here, blurred water in the foreground plays an important part in the composition, but we needed a wide-angle lens to capture it.…

01 COPY THE LAYER Rather than combining two separate shots with different focal lengths, you could try enlarging parts of a single image using Photoshop. Of course, this means interpolating pixels or losing resolution, but if you have a high-resolution image, the results can be great. Begin by pressing Cmd/Ctrl+J to duplicate the layer. 02 SELECT THE BACKDROP Grab the Quick Selection Tool and paint over the part of the scene you want to make larger. Here we’ve selected the mountains and treeline. Hold Alt and paint to subtract if the tool goes wrong. With the top layer highlighted, hold Alt and click the Add Layer Mask button to convert the selection to a mask. 03 ENLARGE THE LAYER Highlight the bottom layer and click the lock icon to unlock…