Photoshop Scenery Tricks
With a regular or digital camera, you're often stuck with the image you get after you press the button to take a picture, including bad lighting, gray skies, an errant bird in your landscape or even a person who has walked into your shot by accident. Thanks to Photoshop, a graphics software program available as part of the Adobe Creative Suite, you no longer are tied down. You can edit and enhance your images with Photoshop's tools, often in just a few clicks, performing quick tricks on your scenery photographs.
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Lighting
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Even if your landscape shot takes place on a rainy day with gray skies, your end product need not look so gloomy. Photoshop's tricks for scenery include a variety of ways to change the lighting of the image. For example, if you take a picture of a park just as a cloud floats across the sun, you can make use of Photoshop's "Levels" slider bar to remove the gray tones from the sky. The "Brightness/Contrast" slider bar is also effective here. Another benefit comes from Photoshop's "Lasso" tool, with which you can draw a line around a specific area to lighten it, such as only the sky or a wave of water. You can pick and choose areas to add light in your picture without brightening the entire photo. Of course, this works in reverse, too. If you've been waiting for a gray day to use in a somber shot and Mother Nature just won't comply, take the photo into Photoshop and use the same tools, but slide the bars in opposite directions, adding ominous, cloudy darkness to your images.
Colors
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Whether it has been a bad year for crops, you forgot to water the lawn or just didn't manage to get very many flowers blooming in your garden, Photoshop can help you amp up your scenery. Photoshop's color tools provide several ways to enhance color. You can use the "Lasso" tool or the "Magic Wand" (which selects a large surrounding area) to highlight a section of grass, then click the program's "Hue/Saturation" option. Within that window, you can use the "Hue" slider bar to change the color to bright green (or purple, pink, blue), then slide the "Saturation" bar to the right, adding more depth of color. This can also be used to change your scenery to a more cartoon-like image. These same tools or others such as the "Color Picker" may be used to actually change colors in the image. For example, if your scene is of a large group picnicking, you can quickly change everyone's shirt color to the same hue, creating a cohesive group shot.
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Shadow
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Images often appear more realistic when they have depth, so they appear as if they are 3-D or floating on the page. One way to do this is with a shadow, which Photoshop can quickly add to your scenery. You can select an object, such as a tree or a rock, then use tools such as the "Drop Shadow" to create shadowing around the object. Increase or decrease the length of the shadow to replicate the time of day and year. The glow function is similar to shadowing; Photoshop provides tools called "Inner Glow" and "Outer Glow." This is a way to highlight something specific in your picture, such as a bench or cloud, by surrounding it with a layer of light.
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