articles/Landscape/simplicity-page2

Simplicity - part 2 of 1 2

by Paul Gallagher Published

I set out on a voyage of discovery into how I could use the tools and controls in Photoshop to do exactly that. After some fumbling I managed to narrow this down to almost identical methods of 'printing' that I used in the darkroom, which consists of using the Lasso tool with varying feather values, and curves adjustment layers. That's it!

If you look at the screen grabs from my workings here, this is how I work. When using the Lasso tool, two things are worth considering. Firstly the feather that you apply will be relative to the size of your image file, in pixels. For example, a feather of 50 pixels may be fine for a particular selection for an image with pixel dimensions of 8000x6000 pixels. However if the same image was to be resized to 800x600 pixels then this feather applied, the same selection would be far too big and the resulting adjustment would effect a much larger proportion of the image.

Secondly if you hold down the Alt key you can select 'off canvas', which enables your selection to take effect right up to the edge of you frame, as opposed to within the image area. When I select an adjustment layer I do so by clicking on the half black/half white circle icon at the foot of the layers palette and select 'curves'.

If we begin by looking at the raw scan of the image, the most important aspect to consider is that it contains all the tonal range, from black to white. The thing to avoid is to try to get your finished image tonal range at the scanning stages, as you will inevitably 'clip' your tonal range by the time you have completed your manipulations. This will result in either clipped shadow detail or clipped highlights. From a raw scan that contains a full tonal range we can achieve a great deal, so it does not matter if the visual impact you wanted is not there at this stage.

When I open up a raw scan I firstly look at the balance of the image as a whole and ask myself, 'do I need all of the image area to convey the message?' With this image I did not, and I decided to crop the upper part of the sky to remove the distracting cloud creeping in at the top-left of the image and secondly, remove some of the bright sunlit sky. (See Crop)

Beginning with Curve 1, I made a selection of the entire sky and pushed the curve in the darker-pixel end, to reduce the sky values. At the same time I 'pegged' the lighter values of the curve back onto the original position to retain highlights. Now concentrating on the lower part of the image I made a lasso selection of the sea and beach (Curve 2) and pulled the lower end of the curve downwards to lighten the sand and sea and once again 'pegged' the shadows back to their original position to avoid them becoming somewhat sooty-looking. You will notice that the highlights in the sky and shadows in the lower part of the image are being preserved.

It is all too easy to employ curves to increase contrast as standard and lose highlight and shadow detail of the overall picture.With this section of sky removed I began my process of using lasso selections and curves. From this point I always try to break down the image into 'segments of work' because without this you can find yourself swopping from one section to another and having no real direction to what you are doing. I broke this image into segments of sky and cloud, sea, wet beach and upper sky.

• Simplicity page 1
  
• Simplicity page 2
  

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