Tutorial 2
James Paterson gets to grips with the Graduated Filter tool and shows how to enhance landscape scenes within seconds
Take charge of exposure with Photoshop’s Graduated Filter
of all the tools available in Photoshop’s Camera Raw plugin – or indeed in the entirety of Photoshop – the Graduated Filter is one of the most useful, especially for landscape photographs.
The tool allows you to make a linear adjustment over part of your photo, creating a transitional blend of tones. Anywhere beyond the first point that is defined will be entirely affected by the tonal settings you input, with a gradual fall-off determined by the length of the line you drag.
As such, it enables you to create enhancements to areas of your photos. It’s useful for balancing a scene in which one part might be darker or brighter than another. With landscapes, this can occur when we include sky and land, as skies tend to be brighter. Achieving such a balance would involve a lens-mounted graduated neutral density filter to block some of the light from the sky. This is a good option for many scenes, but the Graduated Filter tool in Camera Raw offers more controls.
Not only can we hold back exposure, we can also boost contrast and detail, which is ideal for boosting flat, featureless skies like this. What’s more, we have a fine degree of control over what is affected by the grad, as once applied, we can go on to target specific portions of the sky either by freehand brushing, or by using intelligent tools like Range Masking. Let’s take a look at some of the features of this tool…