This was definitely a throwaway shot, taken at a small fishing village near Bar Harbor, Maine. I was waiting for my shooting buddy to catch up with me, so I cranked off this fairly lame shot of a porch. I knew it was lame when I took it, but once I saw it later in Photoshop, I thought the porch looked okay, but it was the detail in the shot that actually detracted from it. The solution? Make the porch a silhouette and try to make the sky look warmer and more like sunset. You can almost do this whole thing in Camera Raw itself. Well, almost.

Step One:
Begin by downloading the file used here, from Chapter 10 of Scott Kelby's 7-Point System for Adobe Photoshop CS3. You will need to download the ZIP file for Chapters 8-14, and then open the file for just Chaper 10. Open the unadjusted photo in Camera Raw. This photo is a JPEG, so to open it within Camera Raw, you have to first go under the File menu and choose Open (PC: Open As). When you find the JPEG photo you want to open, click on it, but don’t click Open yet. Instead, choose Camera Raw from the Format (PC: Open As) pop-up menu. Then click the Open button, and it opens in Camera Raw (as shown here). Mouseover to enlarge the image at left.

Step Two:
This photo is pretty bland, so we’re going to take some creative license and change the photo into more of a silhouette to give it some visual interest. We’ll start by greatly warming up the photo by adjusting the white balance. If this had been a RAW photo, we could just choose the Shade preset from the White Balance pop-up menu, but since this is a JPEG (and the only available preset is Auto), we’ll have to warm it up manually. Drag the Temperature slider way over to the right towards yellow to +60. Then drag the Tint slider over to the right, as well, to +11.

Step Three:
Now the color of the light is more like dusk, but the intensity of the light is too bright, so we’re going to lower the exposure to make it more like dusk. This is an easy adjustment—just drag the Exposure slider to the left until it reads –1.80.

Step Four:
To give us the silhouette effect, you’ll have to increase the blacks (shadows) by quite a bit. So, drag the Blacks slider over to the right until all the detail pretty much falls into the shadows. In this instance, drag over to around 41 and that should do the trick.

Step Five:
To pump up the intensity of the color, drag the Vibrance slider over to the right (I use Vibrance instead of Saturation, because Vibrance increases the least saturated colors most, and affects the already saturated colors the least). Here I dragged the Vibrance slider over to +45. Now go ahead and click the Open Image button to open the image in Photoshop.

Step Six:
Once it’s open in Photoshop, we’re going to darken the top of the sky (kind of a neutral density gradient filter effect). Press D to set your Foreground color to black, then click on the Create New Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers panel, and choose Gradient from the pop-up menu (as shown here).

Step Seven:
When the Gradient Fill dialog appears, the gradient darkens the ground instead of the sky (that’s the default setting), so you’ll need to turn on the Reverse checkbox (shown circled here), but don’t click OK yet.

Step Eight:
Also in the Gradient Fill dialog, click once directly on the gradient thumbnail itself to bring up the Gradient Editor. You control how far down your gradient extends by clicking-and-dragging the top-right opacity stop to the left (as shown here). Now, here’s the weird thing: you don’t get a live preview as you drag this stop—you have to drag it over to the left and release the mouse button to see the results (I have no idea why it’s this way). So, click-and-drag it over to the left a little so the gradient doesn’t extend all the way to the bottom, and the gradient is mostly in the sky. Okay, now you can click OK in both dialogs.

Step Nine:
To have your gradient blend in with your color photo (instead of covering it), change the blend mode of this Gradient layer to Soft Light (as shown here). Then flatten your layers by clicking on the triangle in the top right of the Layers panel and choosing Flatten Image from the panel’s flyout menu.

Step 10:
To increase the contrast and add more punch to the color, we’re going to do a Lab color move. Go under the Image menu, under Mode, and choose Lab Color. Now, go under the Image menu and choose Apply Image. The only thing you have to do in this dialog is to change the Blending pop-up menu to Soft Light. That does the trick. Click OK, and then go back under the Image menu, under Mode, and choose RGB Color.

Step 11:
To finish this project off, let’s wrap it up with some good, old-fashioned sharpening. Go to the Actions panel, click on your Sharpen High action, and then click on the Play Selection icon (as shown here).

The before and after images are shown at left.