I guess we have to accept now (certainly here in the UK) that the summer months are well and truly gone, but without feeling too down in the dumps, there’s the magic of Autumn to look forward to bringing with it a change in the trees to beautiful burnt oranges, yellows and reds.
In the mean time though, if you’re feeling a little impatient, here’s a REALLY quick technique in Photoshop for creating an Autumn scene plus adding in a dreamy glow…
Step 1
With an image open in Photoshop (this one was taken by my friend Mark Baber from Sony, handheld using an A6600) , click to add a Hue / Saturation Adjustment Layer:
Step 2
Choose Greens from the Master menu and then at the bottom of the panel, click on the far left marker and drag to the right so that all are bunched up together:
The reason we do this is because when we first choose a colour from the Master menu, Photoshop decides what range of that colour we will be affecting by where it places the marker.
There are 2 inner and 2 outer markers. Directly above and in-between the two inner markers is the range of colour Photoshop says we’ll be affecting; the two outer markers is where Photoshop is being kind and saying “you can have a bit of this as well…just incase”.
In this case we don’t want Photoshop to be in control because it doesn’t know the range of colour we want to alter in the picture we have open; hence why we first of all bunch all the markers together, and then…
Step 3
Click on the + sampler icon and then click down and drag over the area of green foliage / leaves in the picture.
Notice how when you do this, the markers now move apart. As you drag over the green foliage / trees, Photoshop moves the markers accordingly so that they now include all the range of greens (between the far end markers)
Step 4
Now all we need to do is to drag the Hue slider to the left until we get the colouring we want…
Here’s the BEFORE image…
Here’s the AFTER image…
As this was done using a hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer, I painted on the attached layer mask in the bottom right hand corner with a brush at 50% to reduce the overall effect on the rock; it seemed a little too strong for my taste at 100%.
Dreamy Glow Effect
Adding the dreamy glow effect is super easy too.
There is an effect out there in the landscape photography world called the Orton Effect and this is kind of similar, but Photoshop being Photoshop there’s so many ways to do things and end up with similar results…
Step 1
Click on the Background layer in the layer stack and hold down the Command (Mac) / CTRL (Windows) keys and press J to create a duplicate. Rename this layer to glow
Step 2
With the glow layer active in the layer stack, go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur
Dial in the equivalent of what the pixel size of your camera is (i.e. the one used to take the photograph).
In this case, Mark used a 24 Mega Pixel camera, so I dialled in a Radius of 24 pixels.
Click OK
Step 3
Change the Blend Mode of the glow layer to Soft Light and then lower the opacity of the layer to taste.
BEFORE the Dreamy Glow Effect…
AFTER the Dreamy Glow Effect…
In this example I lowered the opacity to 50% so that you can clearly see the effect; ordinarily I’d go for a lower opacity…somewhere around 30% is usually about right.
Hope you found this useful.
As always, if you have any questions / comments then please feel free to make use of the comments section below and I’ll be sure to get back to you.
Cheers,
Glyn