Velvet Hills

[Nicole]

Since Peeperita asked me nicely over on my Flickr page what I had done with this photo I thought it would be good if I could make a post out of it. I should say at this point that I should really save my .psd files or something that remembers what I did because I worked on this yesterday and just saved it as a .jpg and of course, can't remember each step exactly, so I will do my best.

Before:


After:


A quick look at my layers palette:


You can see from the palette that my basic tools were: Hue / Saturation, a B&W adjustment layer and Curves. The first thing I did since when I shot this I wanted to make sure to keep the clouds (and honestly HDR wouldn't be an option unless I was doing it from a single RAW file since this was on a moving ship, and HDR is a bit beyond me lol), was to duplicate the layer and use the Shadows / Highlights adjustment. I didn't want to do that on my original layer, but it's not an adjustment layer of it's own, so I duplicated the original and adjusted it, then adjusted the opacity of the Shadows / Highlights layer. The rest of my adjustments were all done doing the adjustment layers so that I could turn them on or off and change things or mask things as I wanted to. I used curves twice (there may be a more effective way to do this, but I don't know it). The first time was to lighten the picture up a little more, the second time I used Medium Contrast. I added a B&W adjustment layer to bring out some more contrast and darken things up in certain places. I set that to a soft light blending mode. Last of all I played with the Hue / Saturation twice, there were some overall adjustments, and then I also wanted to increase the green and turn the more yellowy shades a little darker without messing up the clouds, so I did another Hue / Saturation layer adjusting just those colours and masking off the sky (the sky actually showed a lot of green when I was playing with the saturation of that). I'm pretty sure that's about everything. I may have also ended it with High Pass sharpening which tends to bring out those edges and even provide a little more lightness.

Overall, I was very happy with how it turned out. My motivation in getting this look was playing with the Nik Color Effects filters, which look very nice, but I figured that through trial and error I could get a result I liked without paying between $100-300. They do have some neat filters, but...

So yep, that was my process.

[Ecirish]

Very, very nice! I'm surprised that you could bring out some much detail of the sun on the hills, but regardless, it really works. The only thing i can detect is a slight bluish green color that seems to be noticed on some of the lower clouds....a little too green i would say. but great photo nonetheless.

[wulf]

This is a really good example of how a dull looking photo can have a surprising amount of life in it with a little work to bring it out. It is a bit like polishing an old bit of metal work and seeing it shine.

Wulf

[oriolhdz]

Nice, clean and simple! Pretty good tutorial! I agree with Wulf about how some work can change the picture a lot.

[windrider86]

I purchased Nik Color effects 2 off of Ebay for $25 bucks. You might want to look into that. Its not quite as easy as 3 as it doesnt give you previews for each effect, but after awhile you kinda know which one does what

[Nicole]

Thanks guys I was very pleasantly surprised with what I was able to bring out.

windrider, thanks, I'll keep an eye out for something like that.

[peeperita]

oh, nicole!.....i just found this thread tonight....and if it had't been titled velvet hills, i might have not seen it still...

sorry i'm late to the dance, but i really appreciate your sharing of post work.....you have a marvelous hand.....

thanks again...

peeper

[Nicole]

I'm glad you found it! I've kept meaning to drop you a note to let you know that I'd put the description up here for you.

[jiminyClickit]

Nicole,

Painterly, in the very best sense. As if the hand and eye and imagination all came together. No more "new at PP" for you.

[Nicole]

Thank you Jim. The compliment means a lot coming from you.