Saturday, August 11, 2012

Thanks to Elena and Marianne . . .

Elena Nosyreva, thank you for suggesting an alternative way of making my boat stand out more, and thank you, Marianne Skov Jensen, for giving me the specific workflow.

Early this morning we went up to the docks in Newport and I took a photo of a boat that's similar to my photos in the previous post (overcast light, but the clouds weren't quite as cool). Instead of creating a new layer, filling it with neutral grey, and then using a dark/light brush to lighten and darken what I wanted, I used an adjustment mask, lightened the image (via Levels), inverted the mask and used a brush to let the underlying lighter boat come through. (I may have described that improperly, but I've been up since 4 and am a little loopy at the moment.)

What I like about this method is that it's fairly simple, and I don't have to build up the lightness or the darkness X% at a time, where if you accidentally overlap, it looks awful.

So thank you both for (a) being so smart and (b) for taking the time to show me a different way of doing something.

©Carol Leigh


1 comment:

Elena and Russ said...

Hi Carol,

Sorry I missed the discussion after my comment. I'm glad that Marianne explained it better, and I'm glad that it worked for you.
Adjustment layers with masks are very powerful tools, you may use multiple adjustment layers to selectively change different areas of the image.