Cool Photoshop tricks

[HuiYeng]

Well now that winter is approaching and most mountains have already put on their white coat, I found most of my hiking shots casted with a ugly blue hue. I have played with the snow mode and exposure compensation on my SD600, the result was all more or less the same, BLUE!

Anyway I found this very useful website with many cool Photoshop tricks, one of which quite effectively remove the blue cast on my snow shots. Thought I'd share my experiment with you.

Here is my before and after picture.

For the lack of any photographic skill to fix the problem, I cheated with PS .

 

[jwind]

If you can, the simplest solution is to manually set you color temp in the camera. 500OK is a general rule of thumb. You may find mid winter light to be even cooler ~5100-5200K.

And of course Shooting RAW would give you the freedom to tweak color temp in post.

 

[DougPaul]

If you can, the simplest solution is to manually set you color temp in the camera. 500OK is a general rule of thumb. You may find mid winter light to be even cooler ~5100-5200K.

The color temp depends a lot on the sky color.

And of course Shooting RAW would give you the freedom to tweak color temp in post.

You can also postprocess the color temp of JPEGs, too.


A number of picture processing utilities have a facility where you pick a pixel and then adjust the colors of the entire picture so that the designated pixel becomes white. An easy and very effective way to compensate for the color of the incident light.

Doug

 

[MichaelJ]

If the snow scene (SCN) setting doesn't remove enough of the blue for you, try either separately or together setting a "cloudy" or a "shade" white balance. Take a bunch all at the same time with different settings and see how they compare. You may even find one better for snow under tree cover and the other for exposed areas.

Note that the snow scene (SCN) setting has effects on exposure as well as color.

 

[David Metsky]

And of course Shooting RAW would give you the freedom to tweak color temp in post.

Alas, few cameras besides dSLRs and ultrazooms shoot RAW these days. Since 7summits (and I) are using Canon ultracompacts with very limited manual controls (ISO, exposure compensation, White Balance) we need the PhotoShop tricks where we can get them.

 

[kmorgan]

You can also set the option to use Adobe Camera Raw for JPEG's. Then you have more flexibility.

Kevin

 

[kmorgan]

Well now that winter is approaching and most mountains have already put on their white coat, I found most of my hiking shots casted with a ugly blue hue. I have played with the snow mode and exposure compensation on my SD600, the result was all more or less the same, BLUE!

Anyway I found this very useful website with many cool Photoshop tricks, one of which quite effectively remove the blue cast on my snow shots. Thought I'd share my experiment with you.

Here is my before and after picture.

For the lack of any photographic skill to fix the problem, I cheated with PS .

Played with the picture for a few minutes in PS. Here's what I got using a dark and light layer and a mask on the dark.



Kevin

 

[Tom Rankin]

Played with the picture for a few minutes in PS. Here's what I got using a dark and light layer and a mask on the dark.



Kevin

Nice, you darkened the sky and brightened the snow at the same time!

 

[NewHampshire]

Yeah, but unfortunately NH-Mtn-Hiker looks like his is a sickly gray....maybe he needs someone to run some hot tea out to him .

Brian

 

[HuiYeng]

Hey Kevin, that's pretty cool how you lightened the snow. But I think it may have sacrificed the mood a bit.

I'll remember your trick for my other pictures. Hope you PS users out there enjoy the link, there have many cool tricks there.

Good day!

 

[kmorgan]

Hey Kevin, that's pretty cool how you lightened the snow. But I think it may have sacrificed the mood a bit.

I'll remember your trick for my other pictures. Hope you PS users out there enjoy the link, there have many cool tricks there.

Good day!

Modifications and tricks are all dependent on taste and what you want the picture to look like. There are so many different ways to work a photo that most times you have to try several (or a hundred) different techniques and adjustments to find the one you like.

One of the best tips is to always go to the history palette before trying a new adjustment and make a snapshot that you can return to or use for comparison. You can also use the snapshots to make new files.

Kevin

 

[kmorgan]

How about this adjustment. I took about 1/2 hour to do it.



Kevin

 

[Grumpy]

Well now that winter is approaching and most mountains have already put on their white coat, I found most of my hiking shots casted with a ugly blue hue. I have played with the snow mode and exposure compensation on my SD600, the result was all more or less the same, BLUE!

Anyway I found this very useful website with many cool Photoshop tricks, one of which quite effectively remove the blue cast on my snow shots. Thought I'd share my experiment with you.

Here is my before and after picture.

For the lack of any photographic skill to fix the problem, I cheated with PS .

The second version of your photo, as corrected in Photoshop, appeals to me as being quite natural. Basically, what has been done here is to remove blue from the snow that is illuminated by the sun, and from the hint of flesh tones in the human figure.

The foreground is in shadow and so, illuminated by a blue sky, will tend toward a blue cast in any event. You really don't want all the blue out of the snow, or it will look unnatural. This is like shooting an early or late day -- sunrise or sunset -- scene in which the snow takes on a reddish cast. If you remove it all, you sterilize the picture and lose the magic of the light.

One possible solution for your too-blue snow shots might be to use a "skylight" or "warming" filter.

G.

 

[DougPaul]

The second version of your photo, as corrected in Photoshop, appeals to me as being quite natural. Basically, what has been done here is to remove blue from the snow that is illuminated by the sun, and from the hint of flesh tones in the human figure.

It is interesting to note that this picture has two "whites". There is a spot in the background (just behind the hiker's pack) of sunlit snow. This, in a sense, is a "true white". The foreground snow, which is shaded from the direct sun, is lit by (blueish) skylight and appears as a "blueish white".

The camera may have taken its white balance from the "true white", but perceptually, the "blueish white" dominates. When you are there in person, the eye can compensate the two regions independently, but when looking at a photo, the eye does not compensate well and the foreground looks very blue.

Strictly speaking, the sunlit and non-sunlit portions of the picture should be white compensated differently. However, since the sunlit portion is so small and it is in the background, a single compensation may suffice.

And I agree with Grumpy--compensating the foreground snow to be pure white looks unnatural. A hint of blue looks better to me.

Doug