Skip to main content

Featured

Replacing a Sky with Luminar Neo

Replacing a Sky with  Luminar Neo On different occasions I've taken photo in breathtaking landscape knowing that I later would have to do something about the sky when editing the shot.  That often meant spending hours in Photoshop to edit an image to get sky and atmosphere, colors and light right. And all this work is necessary although PS itself offers a sky replacement tool. Yes, it is capable most of the times to correctly select the sky and thus replace it is that selected space. But when it comes to refining the placement light, colors and more there is a lot missing. Or a lot manual work required.  Luminar Neo makes it a lot easier to replace a sky with their AI powered tool. I've tried a bunch of different situations and was amazed how precisely the program could do its job. It is particularly difficult to fit in a sky in a bit hazy scenery such like the one you see above and I was impressed that it could differentiate between the hazy sky and the merely visible sea in t
Post a Comment
Read more
Labels

Gradients and Textures

Hi,
this time I wanted to bring in a new element that I often use, but never discussed or pointed out in one of my previous posts. The use of color gradients in the processing of my textured photographs. I became aware of the importance of gradients during my work for the app Stackables and now use them in my processing of iPhone shots more frequently.
I thought this misty forest scene could be turned into a mystical exquisitely work:


   

I wanted to use textures and enhance the colours which isn't always manageable  with texture only so the idea of using a gradient came into play. I was also keen on using some of my new textures to demonstrate how they turn this rather ordinary scene into something special and magical. 


Texture Choice

I added some textures with grit & grain to the last pack and thought that they would go nicely with this scene adding some kind of "fairy dust" to it. Here are the ones I chose:

G & G Universe

G&G Winter Eve

Shadow Magnets
You'll find this textures here: Mixed Specialties


The G & G textures work best with blending like screen, lighten or color dodge, but can be used with other modes as well (as I found out with the first one)

After applying the textures I got the following result: 


Adding a gradient

As I said before, I wanted to have strong colours but they still had to fit the overall mood and if possible the existing tones of the picture. So some red/orange and some blue should was the target. From my work on Stackables I had some unused texture I selected for this purpose:

Harmony grd
The blue seemed to be going quite well with the blue hues the G & G texture added on the right side and the orange would enhance the foreground.

...and it did.

For a better overview of the processing here is the screenshot of the layers I used:


As mentioned before I didn't use screnn/lighten/ color dodge with the g&g winter eve texture, but with multiply I got a better effect with the other textures on top and the grain was not so obvious, but still recognizable.

I played around with the gradient for quite a while and ended up with 40% Color Burn as the perfect setting.

As always I worked on contrast and colours to achieve the tones and atmosphere I liked best.

Thanks for reading!


Don't forget that there is currently a huge DISCOUNT of 25% on my textures over on my HOMEPAGE  just add the coupon code MAY2014 at the checkout!!

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment