Hi all

I need some input on what I can do to help this image out. I'm new to processing and am not having much luck strenghening the background. Any ideas?

Thanks
Phil

Hey Phil - it’s usually in poor taste to play with someone else's image but I have to go through the motions to tell you what I might do. IMO the washed out sky is the biggest problem in your photo.

Here were the steps:

1 Select the magic wand tool and set tolerance to 50
2 select an area of the sky towards the top of the pic with the magic wand tool. Then use the bucket tool to fill in the selected area with the color white
Now most of the sky is white but some of it is still yellow where the mountains and sky meet. This band of yellow prevents you from accurately selecting the whole sky and we need to fix that.
3 use the clone tool to get rid of the yellow sky band above the mountains but before you do that note which yellow it is with the eye dropper in the color picker (third tool from bottom on my tool bar; there are many shades of yellow in this band, just pick one you like). Write those color settings down or just set it as the background color in the color picker with the eye dropper.
4 Now the whole sky is white after using the clone tool (hopefully you know how to use this) - above the mountains all the way to the top of the pic. When you use the magic wand again as in step 1 the whole sky will be selected including the sky right above the mountains in the distance. The bottom border of the selected sky area follows the mountain profile perfectly which is what we wnated in the first place.
5 use the color picker to select a blue color for the foreground and then select the yellow that you noted in step 3 for the background (use numbers written down if it’s not already set by default from step 3)
6 use the gradient tool and draw a line from the top of the pic to right above the mountains. This should blend the sky going from blue on the top to yellow above the mountains. If you don't like the colors go back and slelect different shades of yellow and blue in the color picker.
7 go to levels and adjust the mid slider left to lighten some of the shadows
8 Add saturation to taste (I’m an old-time photog who shot with velvia for years so I like saturation - YMMV)
9 bump up the contrast slightly

Now by introducing more color in the sky the shot looks better and we also lightened up the shadow slightly as well. Whether it is ethical to do this much Photoshop work is a topic for another thread. I feel differently in different situations. Here are the results:

Thanks for the input! I am new to processing photos with photoshop, but I will try your suggestions. I have played around with photoshop in the past, so I am generally familiar with what you mention. I'll post what I come up with later

Thanks!

Phil

Ok, is this any better? I filtered the sky a little with a cooling filter. I think I might need to play around with it some more. I am having to go light on my edits because I only have the original as a 8bit jpeg and I am running into clipping/posterizing if I try to do too much. I haven't notched up the saturation yet, do you still think I should do that?

Much better Phil. I going to try that cooling filter on some of my shots.

-Mike

Thanks for your help and suggestions for working on this Mike!

You did not say how you took the picture. This one screams out for a hard neutral grad filter in shooting with several stops for shooting. This would allow the bottom and top to be better focussed.

Nice improvements in processing.

Hi Scott,

This was taken with a p&s, probably on full auto from with what I can remember. I didn't have my DSLR then. (The trip had a good deal to do with me upgrading)

Anyhow, in the future I know to try to get a better picture into the camera to begin with. Thanks for the comments on the processing

Phil