Make The Colours In Your Landscapes Sing

James Paterson shows you how to get to grips with targeted Curves edits in Photoshop CC for an array of powerful landscape-boosting tricks

- James Paterson

At first glance a freshly shot landscape may appear more muted than you expected, but there’s often a whole heap of colour info in there, just waiting to be teased out. In this tutorial we’ll look at how to make your landscape photo’s colours sing, but rather than applying a uniform saturation boost to the scene, we’ll instead make a series of targeted edits that are tailored to specific areas. We can make use of Photoshop’s array of intelligent selection tools, not least of which is the Select Sky command, which isolates the sky for us. Once done, we’ll use the Curves command to boost tones and colours. Not only can we use Curves to add punch, we can also target the red, green or blue channels and use them to subtly shift the colours in the scene.

This is where Adjustment Layers come in. When we add an Adjustment Layer the active selection is converted to a layer mask, which lets us make a local adjustment. It’s this combo of Adjustment Layers and Masks that makes editing landscapes in Photoshop such a joy, as we have complete control over the changes we make. At any time we can change the area that’s affected by altering the layer mask, or change the strength of the tonal change by tweaking the Adjustment Layer settings. Get to grips with this workflow and you’ll be able to make precise, targeted colour enhancements to your landscapes, whatever the scene.

THE MISSION

Use a series of selection tools and Curves Adjustment Layers to boost colours and tones

Time needed 20 minutes

Skill level Intermediate

Kit needed Photoshop CC