Key editing tips
Rough edit in Camera Raw
Begin with a rough edit in Adobe Camera Raw. We lifted the Shadows and then decreased the Highlights significantly for a more dramatic sky. A little Dehaze boosted the trees in the background, and Vibrance and Saturation increased the colours. Finally, a bit of Clarity was used to add punch to the image.
Golden light
We wanted to increase the warmth of the image. Add a Selective Colour adjustment layer and select Whites. Decrease the Cyan slider (we settled on -40) and increase the Yellow slider (+70 worked for us) to add a golden hue to the white clouds. You can then adjust the intensity by decreasing the layer’s opacity.
Make your figure pop
To make your figure stand out a little more against the background, open a Curves adjustment layer and nudge the highlights. Just focus on how the Curves tool is affecting your figure – don’t worry about blowing out highlights elsewhere as we’ll deal with this later. You can control the intensity of the layer by altering the opacity.
Remove detracting details
We opened our image in Adobe Photoshop CC and removed anything that detracted from the scene: branches in the top-right of the frame, buoys, and buildings on the shoreline. Use the Patch Tool to draw around an item to select it. Click the selection and drag your cursor to the area you want to use as the patch.
LUTS to choose from
You can make further colour adjustments with colour lookup tables (LUTS). Open a Color Lookup adjustment layer and click the Load 3D LUT dropdown box. We used Latesunset, Edgyamber and Dropblues, which we controlled using the opacity slider and layer masks, using a white brush to remove unwanted parts of the mask.
Adjust with a brush
Hold Cmd/ctrl+i to invert the adjustment layer’s mask (this will hide the Curves layer). Now select a soft white brush. Anywhere you paint will reveal the hidden Curves layer, allowing you to apply the layer selectively by brushing over your figure. Hit ‘\’ to reveal a red overlay for a better visualization of your layer mask.