How Much?
page fourSelect the airbrush tool in the toolbox. In its options bar, set Pressure to 5 %, pick a soft brush (from the second or third row in the brushes pop-up palette).
Click once on the adjustment layer mask. This will put you into mask-edit mode. You can confirm this by looking at the icon just to the right of the eyeball icon for the layer; it will be a little dotted circle instead of a paintbrush. Do not press the Alt key when you click on the mask, this time. You want to see the image as you edit.
Set your foreground color to black (press the D key, then the X key; when in mask-edit mode, the default colors are reversed).
Using the airbrush tool, paint over the transition area. Using such a low Pressure setting will cause the airbrush to add tone very slowly. This is what you want. It’s important to build up the mask slowly so you can blend it smoothly into the other tone. Keep stroking each area until the image blends smoothly from sky into trees.
Note: I am using black to extend the darker, unmasked tones down into the trees. I am adding to the mask, and removing some of the adjustment.
If, in the image that you are working on, you need to do the reverse, i.e. remove the mask, and add to the adjusted area (if, for example, I had wanted to blend from the trees, upwards by making the sky lighter where it meets the trees) then you would paint with white instead of black (press the X key to switch your foreground and background colors).
After I had blended the sky into the trees by painting on the mask with the airbrush, I Alt-clicked on the mask so I could show you what it looked like. You can see, below, how I’ve blurred the edges.
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Now, suppose you want to do some color correction. Perhaps I’d like to try removing some blue and adding a little bit of yellow.
I added another Levels adjustment layer by clicking on the black and white icon at the bottom of the Layers palette and picking Levels from the menu.
In the Levels dialog, at the top of the box, where it says Channels, I picked Blue from the menu.
Then, as before, I used the center slider below the histogram to manipulate the blue content of the image. Moving the slider to the right removes blue and adds yellow. Moving it to the left adds blue and removes yellow. I moved it to the right a little beyond what I thought looked right, and then clicked OK to exit the dialog.
Below, you can see the full image with the added yellow. Okay, maybe I added more than a little … You do want to exceed what you think you’ll need, but probably not by this much.
As with the first adjustment layer, Alt-click on your layer mask, add a black to white gradient from side to side, choose Image > Adjust > Posterize and enter the number of steps that you want. I used six, this time.
Alt-click the mask again to see your image, and pick the stripe that you think is correct. Then Alt-click the mask one more time, use the eyedropper to pick up the desired shade of gray and then press Alt-Backspace to fill the mask. I used the tone which was almost black as I really only wanted to add a tiny bit of yellow.
I’m going to make one more adjustment to this image, and then I’ll give you a bunch of additional tips for using this technique. I’ll show you the corrected image after the next step.
Continue on page five
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Copyright © 2004 by Jay Arraich.
All rights reserved.
All photographs copyright ©2004 by Jay Arraich
jay@arraich.com
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