Landscape
Transformations
From Mundane to Mystical
The moonrise timing for this night was horrible but I managed to pull out a full Milky Way impression on my sensor 10 minutes after moonrise which most would say is impossible. It took a few attempts in photoshop with different techniques to bring the flat bluish looking sky back into a natural multicolored Milky Way sky but it worked. The actual image data is there, it just needs to pushed around "heavily" and I found that using a few different exposures and some of the blend modes in photoshop with some minor local editing did the trick.
From Redwood to Mirkwood
I usually process my photos to look like the original scene with just a little extra for the "Wow" factor, but I had driven about 1500 miles and ended up with rain almost the entire trip. My yield was low for the trip so I took a few of the shots and really threw some photoshop at them hoping to get some return on my investment. So I "crossed over" and let the right side of my brain take control, Haha. :)
From Pretty to Pretty Amazing
I was asked by a friend to show him how to create and enhance alpineglow. This image is processed overall and then was broken down into 4 zones. The sky, the mountain, the bushes and trees and finally the water. This allows me focus on a specific area of the photo as I work.
From Noon to Sunset
In this example I was asked by a client how to replace a sky in an image with a fairly complex horizon, including trees. I used a fairly simple separation masking technique and I picked up a sky from my collection then mask it in. Notice the wires connecting to the top of the barn and the sky passing through all the leaves on the tree. That mask took less then 5 minutes to make and was a pixel perfect fit as you can see.
From Flat Colors to Fall Colors
Here's a good example of how you can use the HSL tools while doing basic exposure adjustments and color corrections to target the three fall color hues in the HSL panel, not only does it create amazing color separation but also enhances overall detail throughout the scene.
From Failure to Fabulous
By combining several exposures into a 32 bit file and using the additive correction technique I was able to recover this horribly over exposed photo and transform it into a very moody artistic shot.
To fix the blown out sky in the background, I used a layer shape with a mask and painted into the mask instead of painting directly on a transparent layer this way I can click and edit the color used with sliders to select a new color or hue.