Last year, I took a photo workshop at Tomales Bay led by Dave Wyman and Ken Rockwell. One of the spots along our adventure was this fishing boat aground at Inverness – a boat that’s been photographed many, many times! We had some beautiful light this particular morning.
Earlier this week I selected this image to attempt to enhance it a bit in Photoshop CS5. Click to continue reading the approach I took.Here’s the original image:
My first step was to darken its bit – focusing primarily on the skies above. I used Nik’s Color Efex Pro, Multiply blend mode and 30% opacity for this layer:
Next, I wanted to warm up the sunrise light a bit – along with the rusty tones of the boat itself. This was done using a Solid Color Adjustment layer with an orangish tone, Multiply blend mode also at about 30% opacity.
The third layer is used to deepen the blue sky and push it a bit toward more of an azure color. I used a Solid Color Adjustment layer with a dark blue color, Overlay blend mode at about 65% opacity.
This darkened the whole image considerably – so I needed to lighten the boat itself. I wanted to keep the ground dark and loved the beauty in the skies – so no need to adjust those. To bring back the boat a bit, I used a Curves adjustment layer and painted in a layer mask in Normal blend mode at 100% opacity to block the effect of the darker layer below. Here’s what I ended up with for the layer mask – note that I left the front of the boat’s cabin pretty much alone so that it continues to benefit from the sun’s warmth:
This results in the final image:
Here’s another image from the same scene that I processed earlier this year – using a texture technique that time:
They’re very different – one very gritty, stormy, moody while the other captures that morning is breaking mood, vibrant colors, etc. I like them both!