Mountains over Seward

Almost a year ago, I went to the NAPP Photoshop World in Las Vegas.  I’m dying to go again this year, but I’m afraid I’m out of time.  Maybe next year – especially if they would add more about using Photoshop in the medical field… but I digress.

One of the main concepts I came away with was courtesy of Jean Paul Caponigro.  He said: color is merely a blend of hue, saturation, and luminosity.  He lamented that a photoshop filter (similar to the channel mixer or the contrast/brightness applet) had been removed, but then pointed out that it was back in Adobe Raw, and pointed out a couple of ways to fake it in Photoshop.

Well, that’s kind of the point of the photo to the right.  It was a poorly processed HDR image, which just couldn’t be brought close to color properly in Photomatix – not easily, at least.  The original was far too grey, in fact.  But with H/S/L, we can bring back the colors to how they should be.  The steps I took here, and why:

• Tweaked hue for yellows and greens – moved them more to the green side of the scale, but very slightly.  Yellows, about 11, Greens about 18.  This moved the muted greens over to a more pure green, without adding saturation or brightness.
• Tweaked green luminosity – added no more than 10.  This brightens the greens, which means we lose saturation.  A side benefit: we lose some of the greys.
• Removed about 8 in luminosity from yellows – after the tweaks, they were almost too saturated.
• Slighty bumped green & yellow in saturation – this gets rid of the last of those greys and makes the hills feel “alive.”