ADJUST SELECTIVELY

Creating and refining masks enables light, colour and contrast to be improved

1 REDUCE THE LIGHT

Using a Curves, Levels or Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer, or the Exposure slider in Lightroom or Capture One, darken the image down, keeping an eye on the highlights. The trick is to make the highlights rich and powerful.

4 COLOUR FOR EFFECT

Sometimes, adding colour saturation to the subject can help it stand out from the surroundings. On other occasions, adding the colour to the surroundings is the better technique. Add a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and increase the saturation.

2 DARKEN DOWN FURTHER

With the highlights to taste, add another adjustment layer and darken down the image further, this time keeping an eye on the surroundings, not the subject. Darken them right down, but retain lots of detail.

5 ADD A NEW SKY

In this case, the snowy island looks best when it remains white, so the mask is selected and a large, soft black brush is used to paint out the saturation, leaving only a hint of blue in the sky above. This fits in well with the idea of enhancing the light.

3 BRING BACK THE SUBJECT

Now grab a large, soft black brush and select the mask. Using a simple brush stroke, paint over your subject to lighten it back up, ensuring the edges of the brush are not overly obvious. The result can be quite dramatic.

6 FINESSE THE LAYERS

As with all techniques involving layers and adjustments, it is rare to get the settings exactly right the first time. Be prepared to return to each layer and adjust your settings. In this case, the base Curves adjustment layer has been lightened with a little extra contrast as well.