Creating Better Outside Shots with Photoshop Elements 3

By Mikkel Aaland

Adapted from Photoshop Elements 3 Solutions (Sybex)

Dateline: December 14, 2004
Version: Photoshop Elements 3

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Intensifying the Sky

Cloning Clouds

Below left is a photograph I took on the Spanish island of Menorca. It’s not a bad photograph, but a dramatic sky would make it a lot better. By using Photoshop Elements, and working in the Standard Edit mode, I was able to create the new image shown on the right. You can apply these techniques to make your own dramatic sky.

By cloning a sky from another image, this photo (left) will become a lot more interesting. The same photo with a new sky (right).

1. I opened the image shown above and another image containing a dramatic sky, shown below. Both of these images came from a Kodak Photo CD and were opened at 1536 × 1024 pixels at 144 pixels/inch. (If your images have resolutions that are different from each other, you should resample the image containing the dramatic sky to match the resolution of your target image. To resample, choose Image > Resize > Image Size and type in the matching pixel values.)
   
   These clouds will liven up almost any sky.

2. In the image containing the man and the horse, I created a new layer and called it Clouds (Layer > New > Layer). I did this because I wanted to clone the new sky to its own layer and keep the old sky intact.
3. I selected the Clone Stamp tool from the toolbar and selected the image containing the dramatic sky. In the options bar, I selected the following: Brush: Soft Round 300 pixels; Mode: Normal; Opacity: 100 percent; Aligned: selected; Use All Layers: selected. (The brush size you choose will depend on your image.)
4. I positioned the cursor at the top far left of the dramatic sky and, while holding the Alt/Option key, I clicked and sampled.
5. I placed the cursor on the top far left of the image of the man and the horse and “painted” the new sky. I started with a horizontal stroke, going from left to right, filling in the top 33 percent of the sky. Then, and this is very important, I changed the opacity of the Clone Stamp tool in the options bar to 65 percent. I painted another horizontal layer of sky, this one just under the one that was painted at 100 percent opacity. I painted about 40 percent of the sky this way and stopped just above the top of the horse and the top of the rock talus. At this point, I wasn’t very precise and some of the clone spilled over the horse and the rock talus. However, it didn’t matter because the new sky was actually going on its own layer, the layer I called Clouds, and I would go back later and fix the overlapping areas, as shown below. When I was finished cloning the new sky onto the old, I selected the Move tool from the toolbar. With the layer called Clouds still selected, I put my cursor on the image window, and clicked and dragged the sky around until it was positioned exactly as I wanted.
   
   By keeping Clouds as its own layer, I can go back and edit or enhance it at any time.

6. I chose the Eraser tool from the toolbar. I selected the following options from the options bar: Brush: Soft Round 100 pixels; Mode: Brush; Opacity: 100 percent. On the layer called Clouds, I carefully erased the clouds and sky away from the horse, the man, and the rock. (For the detailed areas, I used a Soft Round 35 pixels and a Soft Round 17 pixels brush.)
7. I enhanced the clouds by applying Levels to the Clouds layer only (Enhance > Adjust Lighting > Levels). Finally, I used the Crop tool to crop off a small part of the right side of the image, where the cloned sky didn’t fit quite to the edge.
8. At this point, I could have flattened my image (Layer > Flatten Image, or Flatten Image from the Layers palette menu), or just saved my image with the two layers intact. Keeping the two layers increases the file size, but I kept them because I wanted the option of going back and tweaking my image, or even restoring the original sky if I wanted.

Changing the Time of Day

With Photoshop Elements, you can imitate the golden light of a sunset or even change day to night. Here are some specific examples with techniques you can use on your own digital images.

Midday to Sunset

The illustration below shows a beautiful scene taken in San Francisco around 3 P.M. by professional photographer Monica Lee and a shot of the Manhattan skyline by me.

These photos are beautiful but they could benefit from warm sunset light. (Photo by Monica Lee (left) and the author (right).)

Method 1:

1. I opened the image and made a new layer called Sunset Light (Layer > New > Layer). I set my layer Opacity to 56 percent and the Mode to Color Burn.
2. I selected an appropriate color for my warm tint. I did this by clicking the foreground color selection box in the toolbox. This brought up the Color Picker, where I chose a color with the following RGB values: Red = 255, Green = 204, and Blue = 102 (see the illustration below).
   
   Choose a warm tint like this one from the Color Picker.

3. I selected the Gradient tool from the toolbox. I chose the following settings from the options bar: Gradient Picker: Foreground to Transparent; Type of Gradient: Linear Gradient; Mode: Normal; Opacity: 100 percent (see the next illustration). Then, with the empty Sunset Light layer selected, I applied the Linear Gradient tool to the image I did this by holding the Shift key and dragging the cursor from the bottom of the image window halfway up, just past the top of the row of houses. Holding the Shift key while I did this constrains the angle to multiples of 45 degrees. (I used the Linear Gradient tool to apply the warm tint, but you can instead apply the tint selectively by using the Brush tool. Just be sure to apply the color to a layer of its own, using the color values from step 2 and the Sunset Light layer specifications from step 1.)
   
   Set the Gradient tool options as shown.

4. After I applied the warm tint, I noticed that the sky looked too light for the late hour I was trying to imitate. To darken the sky, I created a Levels adjustment layer and adjusted the entire image so the background darkened appropriately. I then selected the Gradient tool and kept the same settings as described in step 3. However, I clicked the Default Colors icon (you can also use the shortcut key D) to set the colors in the color selection box to their default colors in the toolbox, and reset my foreground and background colors to black-and-white. I then used the Gradient tool on the adjustment layer to create a mask that prevented the levels adjustment from affecting the foreground (see below left). The result is shown on the right.

Note the Layer options for Sunset Light and the adjustment layer mask (left).
The new image is now bathed in sunset light (right).

1. I opened the image and made a copy of the background layer (Layer > Duplicate Layer).
2. On the duplicate layer I applied a photo filter (Filters > Adjustments > Photo Filter). I chose Warming Filter (85) from the Filter pop-up menu; I set Density to 76 and kept Preserve Luminosity selected. (You can also apply the photo filter as an adjustment layer and forgo step 1. However, you’ll see shortly why I chose to apply it as a normal filter to a copy of the background layer.)
3. At this point, for some images, all you need to do is select OK and you are done. The filter does the job. However, for this image the filter made the sky look strange, as you can see in the illustration below. To correct this, I selected the Magic Eraser tool from the toolbar and after a little experimentation set the Tolerance to 40 in the options bar. I left Contiguous selected. (Tolerance settings depend on how wide a range of similar colors you want to erase and will vary depending on the image. Selecting Contiguous assures that only pixels sharing a boundary or touching each other will be erased.)
   
   The photo filter gave the buildings the glow I was looking for,
   but didn’t do a good job on the sky.

4. On the duplicate layer, I clicked the sky. The Magic Eraser erased most of the sky on the duplicate layer. (The Layers palette and final image are shown in the illustration below.) Now the original sky—which was OK without the filter—shows through from the layer below. (If I had applied the photo filter as an adjustment layer, I couldn’t have conveniently used the Magic Eraser selectively on the sky area.)

Note how the Magic Eraser selectively deleted the sky in the top, duplicate layer (left).
This enables the sky from the background layer to show through (right).

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This jungle scene (left) lacked warmth. I used the layer blending and Opacity settings (right) to make it more tropical.

1. With the Tikal image open, I made two copies of my background layer and named these layers Sharpen and Blur. I created a new layer and called it Tint. My Layers palette is shown on the right, above. The layer order is important.

   Note: The easiest way to duplicate a layer is to select the layer in the Layers palette and drag it to the New Layer button at the top of the Layers palette. The easiest way to create a new layer is to click that button. Remember, the Layer palette is located by default in the palette bin. However, by clicking/holding/dragging on the top tab of the palette you can move the palette anywhere you want on the screen.

2. To the layer called Blur, I applied a strong Gaussian blur (Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur) and set the Radius setting to 5.7. I left the Blur layer blending Mode to Normal and set the layer Opacity to 58 percent.
3. To the layer called Sharpen, I applied an Unsharp Mask (Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask). I used the following settings: Amount: 100 percent; Radius: 1.9 pixels; Threshold: 0 Levels. I then set the Sharpen layer Opacity to 61 percent and left the blending Mode at Normal.
4. I filled the Tint layer with a light orange tint. To do this, I clicked on the foreground color selection box in the toolbox to open the Color Picker, and then I selected a color with the following RGB values: Red = 255, Green = 204, and Blue = 102. I selected fill layer from the Edit menu and chose the settings from the dialog box shown on the left in the illustration below. You can also use the Paint Bucket tool to fill the Tint layer. Just be sure your Fill option in the option bar is set to Foreground and not Pattern. (I want to acknowledge Photoshop master Brad Johnson for concocting this particular tint, which I use often.)
5. I set the Mode of the Tint layer to Color Burn, and the Opacity to 44 percent, and I was done. The final image is shown on the right, below.

Fill settings (left). The final image (right).

Shooting Digital: The Rules of Good Composition Regardless of whether you are shooting a digital camera or a film camera, the rules of good composition remain the same. Somewhere in your picture there should be a focal point. This can mean arranging your shot to include a blooming branch in the foreground, or a large rock in the middle ground, or a dramatic sky in the background. Don’t make the common mistake of assuming that, simply because a scene looks breathtaking to the eye, it will work as a photograph. Without a strong focal point, the camera translates the scene into a mush of small objects that are visually boring. Because most digital cameras don’t capture very high resolution, shots without careful composition are especially uninteresting.

Day to Night

The illustration below is a still frame grabbed from a Lexus TV ad. The shot was taken during the day, but the director, Melinda Wolf, decided afterward that it should have been shot during the night. Special-effects wizard Michael Angelo was called. Before working on the actual footage, Michael used digital editing to show the director what the scene might look like at night. Michael used Photoshop to create this image originally, but he kindly modified his procedure to show how it could be done using Photoshop Elements.

This is how the shot looked during the day (left). This is how it would have looked at night (right).

1. He made a duplicate layer and called it Night. To duplicate a layer, select the layer and drag it to the New Layer button at the top of the Layers palette.
2. With the Night layer selected, Michael removed the color by choosing Enhance > Adjust Color > Remove Color. Then he selected Enhance > Adjust Color > Adjust Hue/Saturation and selected the Colorize option in the dialog box. He tinted the image blue by sliding the Hue slider to the right. He left the Saturation in the middle, set at 50. Then he darkened the overall image by sliding the Lightness slider to the left. Because he selected Preview in the dialog box, all his changes were visible on the actual image and he could easily modify his settings to get exactly what he wanted (see below).
   
   
   Michael’s Hue/Saturation settings (left). Settings for the Lens Flare filter (right).

3. He created a duplicate layer of Night and called it Lens Flare.
4. To the Lens Flare layer, he applied the Lens Flare filter (Filter > Render > Lens Flare). See the illustration above for the settings he used. He dragged the flare over one of the headlights and selected OK. He repeated these steps, selecting the Lens Flare filter again to apply another “headlight.”
5. He duplicated the Lens Flare layer and called this layer Final. On this layer, he used the Dodge tool from the toolbox to paint the reflection of the headlights in the pavement.