The quality of the ambient light plays a significant role in the success of a photograph. Too much sunshine can produce harsh contrast and strong shadows. Cloudy skies produce more balanced light but also lifeless-looking shadows and colder tones – problems that cannot always be circumvented by adjusting white balance settings.
The image in Figure 8-102 would benefit from a little additional contrast and warmer colors. The following steps describe how we add a little “digital sunshine” to our image.
We create a Photo Filter adjustment layer to warm up the colors (Figure 8-103). Here, we check the Preserve Luminosity option.
Now we add a Curves adjustment layer to the top of our stack that we then use to brighten the image (Figure 8-104).
We then use an additional Curves layer to enhance midtone contrast using a classic S-curve (Figure 8-105).
You can see the results in Figure 8-106. However, the image still lacks punch, so we use another of Katrin Eismann’s tricks to pep it up a little:
We create yet another Curves adjustment layer, this time set to Overlay blend mode. Figure 8-107 shows that applying this layer alone overdoes the effect we are looking for.
Reducing layer opacity to about 30% gives us the result you can see in Figure 8-109.
This use of multiple adjustment layers allows us to refine and readjust our corrections at any time. Double-clicking the effect icon in a panel entry automatically opens that layer’s settings dialog.
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