1. Exposure And Light For Better Processing
Good, efficient processing in Photoshop needs the best image possible from the start; you can’t just fix it in Photoshop. This photo was originally shot in harsh midday light, a light that photography often makes look worse than it actually is.

Another challenge is exposure. The photographer underexposed so he wouldn’t lose highlights in the wings. Underexpo-sure causes distinct color problems in the dark areas, however. The photo probably could have used about a half-stop of added exposure, plus it would have helped to shoot in RAW. JPEG is an excellent format, but it places some distinct limitations on an image that has lots of bright highlights.

2. Setting Blacks And Whites
The first step I always take with a photo is to check its black and white areas (simply called the blacks and whites). In this photo, I’ve adjusted the blacks and whites using a Levels adjustment layer. Adjustment layers are easily accessed at the bottom of the Layers palette by clicking on the adjustment layer icon that’s a half-black/half-white circle. I made the adjustments using the threshold screen that appears by holding down Alt/Option while moving the left and right sliders. What you see here is the white threshold screen (Alt/Option right slider); it shows where highlights are clipping or losing detail. You can see that the white is just barely starting to clip, meaning there’s good detail in the white, but not enough to wash it out. The left, black slider was used similarly to deal with the darkest areas. A photo often gains needed contrast from these adjustments alone.

3. Overall Midtones
The colors required a lot of work in this photo, but with the image’s heavy tonalities, you often need to open up the tones so you can better see the color and detail you’re working with. Midtones are best affected by Curves, though you can do a credible job on many images with the midtone slider in Levels. Curves simply gives you more control, as demonstrated here.

I like to work Curves by first clicking somewhere in the bottom or top of the curve (straight middle line to start), depending on whether the control is needed more in the dark (bottom) or bright (top) tones. In this case, I started with the bottom point.

Click and move the curve up or down to make the midtones lighter or darker, respectively. I moved the curve up, but it made the lighter tones in the photo too bright, so I added two control points to bring the line closer to the middle (reducing the effect on brightening). You can add multiple control points to the curve to make it move up or down. I often get by with just three control points, making adjustments a lot simpler.

4. Warming Up the Color
The tones now revealed some flat color in the photo. I wanted to boost them and get some life back into the colors, but lackluster colors caused by the light and exposure can’t be fixed by just cranking up the Hue/Saturation. Overuse of Hue/Saturation is one of the most common problems we see in photographs entered in our contests.

I used a Color Balance adjustment layer over the plane. In essence, I made a warming filter, adding yellow and red with a little magenta. This kicked up the browns in the grassy hills nicely, but it also made the plane look hazy. I wanted to keep the good tonalities for both, so I decided to remove the highlights in the adjustment with a little layer mask help.

5. Controlling The Effect
Controlling the effect on the hills and keeping it off the highlights was a job for the layer mask. Layer masks turn a layer’s effects on and off, depending on the tone: black turns off the effect, white turns it on. Some people like the phrase “Black conceals, white reveals.” I used Color Range (Select > Color Range) to select multiple points on the hills with the plus (+) eyedropper; you can use the minus (–) eyedropper to deselect colors and tones. I needed to keep the effect on the hills and turn it off elsewhere, so I inverted this selection and filled it with black after being sure I was in the layer mask (Edit > Fill > Use > Black). I noticed the wheels picked up a little extra color, so I painted black on them in the layer mask to turn off the effect there.

6. Name That layer
Once you get beyond a layer or two, it’s easy to forget what you did in each one. I like to name the layers at this point (or earlier if I remember), giving them short, descriptive names that fit the adjustment. This is easy to do. Just double-click the layer name to highlight it and type it in (older versions of Photoshop require an extra step of right-clicking the layer to get to Layer Properties, where you change the name—right-clicking, by the way, is important for both Windows and Mac).

7. A Color Boost
Next, I needed to bring out the magenta color on the plane. A Hue/Saturation adjustment layer would do the job, but as I said earlier, you need to use it cautiously. I thought the colors in this photo could get odd if the magenta was adjusted as much as I thought it needed,
so I did two things to limit how Hue/Saturation would be used. First, I used Color Range again to select the specific color. This picked up some of the warm tones in the hills, but mainly selected the plane’s color. When an adjustment layer is chosen at this point (in this case, Hue/Saturation), a layer mask is automatically gener-ated based on this selection. Next, I used the drop-down menu from Edit to select magenta, which limits the adjustment to that color. Photoshop lets you further refine the control with the eyedroppers. I used the plus (+) eyedropper to click on the magenta color in several places. Now, I could really increase the saturation of this one color without screwing up the rest of the image.

8. Shady Work
Next, the shaded side of the plane needed work. The color isn’t very good because of the light and the exposure. First, I needed to brighten that specific area, but nowhere else. To do that, I added a Levels adjustment layer and clicked OK without making any adjustment. Then, I went to the layer mode at the top, clicked on the drop-down menu arrow and got a long list of modes. You don’t need to know them all—Screen and Multiply are both very useful, though: Screen to lighten, Multiply to darken. So I chose Screen, which made the whole photo light.

I needed to limit that lightness to the side of the plane, so I filled the layer mask with black (Edit > Fill > Use > Black; you can also use keystrokes that work with the foreground and background colors—Alt/Option + Backspace to fill with the foreground color, and Ctrl/Cmd + Backspace to fill with the background color). Then I painted in white over the side of the plane (in the layer mask, white turns the effect on). Be sure to choose a soft-edged brush of an appropriate size for the area—you can see the brush in the screenshot shown here (the red circle). This is a much faster way of dealing with a specific area than trying to use a selection tool. You can quickly brush in the overall area, then change the brush to black to fix the edges that went too far.

9. Richer Color
The shade on the side of the plane was now brighter, revealing more color, including a gold stripe that wasn’t so visible before. The dark magenta wasn’t very strong, however, because it was so severely underexposed. When a dark color is underexposed, it loses much of its chroma (chroma relates to how much color is in a tone compared to gray, and as colors drop in brightness, the tone loses that color, becoming grayer). The only way to restore this color is to sample it elsewhere in the photograph and add it to the area.

Using the Eyedropper tool on the toolbar, I clicked on a dark magenta on the tail. Then, I enlarged the image to better see the side of the plane. I added a new layer by clicking the Add Layer icon on the bottom of the Layers palette (the icon just left of the trash can). Next, I used a soft brush to paint the color over the magenta on the side and front of the plane. I changed brush size, as needed, to make it fit, and erased places where I went too far. It should be close, but doesn’t have to be perfect.

The color was right, but it looked like a blob. Another layer mode came to the rescue: Color. This applies the layer to the underlying layers, but only in terms of color. The tones of the original side of the plane now came through. It was a little strong, so I backed it off by turning down the opacity of the layer. In addition, I found places where the color went where it wasn’t supposed to, so I erased those places. The photo had improved considerably since its beginning.

10. Color Detail
I now noticed that the gold stripe was weak. I used the same technique to add a new layer, sample a good gold, paint it over the stripe, change the layer to Color mode and clean up the painting. Actually, I discovered that I couldn’t get a good gold from sampling the weak colors on the plane. I sampled the best I could, then opened the Color Picker by double-clicking the foreground color. I picked a better-looking gold, painted it on, changed the mode, then toned it down at the end by adjusting opacity.

11. Balance
The plane looked good at this point, but I wasn’t satisfied with the photo. I felt the hills in the background were too bright—out of balance with the plane. I wanted to control only them, so I went back to Color Range and selected the hills. I used a new Curves adjustment layer to darken them slightly (remember that the selected area comes in automatically in the layer mask). You don’t have to apply a lot of movement to the curve in Curves for this sort of adjustment. I also painted out the effect by the plane’s wheel over the ground because I thought it made the wheel disappear a bit.

12. Finish
I like to keep a master file that’s finished at its native size, meaning sized and sharpened but still keeping the layers. I sized this for reproduction in a magazine (Image > Image Size—300 ppi, with Resample unchecked), then created a new layer for sharpening. What I needed was a layer that combined all of the adjusted layers into one and put it on top of the layer stack in the Layers palette. Photoshop CS2 allows this to be done easily. Select the top layer, then hold down all the modifiers plus E—Alt/Option + Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + E. This combines all the layers and puts the result into a layer above your selected layer. In earlier versions of Photoshop, you have to hold down these modifiers, then hit N, followed by E.

This new layer allowed me to sharpen the photo without affecting any underlying layer, which was a plus because I had to go back and fix a problem I had missed earlier before using the photo on the cover of Plane & Pilot. I used nik Multimedia Sharpener Pro 2.0 to sharpen this layer. Sharpener Pro is a very intuitive way of sharpening (it’s set to Halftone in this example, but it can be set to specific printers as needed), plus it has an advanced mode that helps solve noise problems in a photograph.

13. Before and After
Compare the “before” and “after” images and you can see quite a difference. Notice that the adjustments resulted in an image truer to how you would actually see the plane, rather than a limited interpretation of the arbitrary technology of the camera under difficult light and underexposure.

If you look at all the adjustments done to the image, the process may seem a little intimidating. But if you take it step by step and understand that each step, each layer, has a specific purpose, you’ll figure it out. Try these ideas on your photographs and see where they can take you!

• • •
Rob Sheppard’s latest book, Adobe Camera Raw for Digital Photographers Only, includes a chapter on using layers effectively.