1. Let’s open photo. For this tutorial, I select my forest shot and I will show how to selectively change leaf color from green to brown.

2. Go to Layer Pallet and select Hue/Saturation.

3. Select “Greens” channel.

4. Select droplet with plus sign (in the middle)

5. Click into area where you want to change color. For this case, I click at green area of  leaves.

6. Reduce Hue to – 50 and add saturation to 5. These valves are adjustable based on your photos and how you would like to process your photos.

7. Select “Yellows” channel and add saturation to 10. Then click OK.

8. You will see that leaf color is changed from green to brown. It’s very simple, isn’t it?

9. What’s more, you may try to play with color in Hue/Saturation and you will see how easy of this method is. I just simply change from green forest to purple forest.

1. Open a photo.

2. Select gradient tool from tool pallet and assign foreground as black and background as white.

3. Select gradient from layer pallet.

4. Adjust gradient fill properties. For this case, I use following parameters: Style: liner, Angle – 90 and scale = 150.

5. You will see gradient effect as show in the photo below.

6. Go to layer pallet and change layer property to Overlay. Reduce opacity from 100% to 60%. The parameters can be adjusted according to each photo.

7. That is. You will see that after applying this technique, your sky will be bluer.

Have a nice and lovely day.

Well, this problem can be solved with Photoshop. Firstly, you need to take photos with RAW format because you can get more information from RAW instead of normal JPG format. Then, you convert your RAW file into 2 JPG files and merge them together by Adobe Photoshop. Anyway, please be informed that this method is good for differences between the sky and the ground just only 2-3 stops. If you have extreme contrast between them, you may need to shoot many exposures and merge them together into one High Dynamic Range photo (HDR).

Let’s take a look of before and after processing.

1. Adjust your RAW file until you get the right exposure for the ground and then convert your RAW file into a JPG file.

Note: Normally I shot my landscape photos with a little bit over exposure because you can get detail at shadow area and you also have less noise as well.

2. Adjust your RAW file until you get the right exposure for the sky. For this case, I reduce digital exposure to -2/3 stop in order to get the good exposure of the sky. Then convert your RAW file into a JPG file.

3. Open both JPG files with Adobe Photoshop. Hold Shift Key and drag the one file to another file. In this case, I drag the dark photo over the bright photo and the reason that you need to hold “Shift Key” because after dragging a file to another file, it will 100% lay over.

4. In the layer pallet, you can see that you have Layer1 over Background Layer.

5. Create a layer mask by pushing a create layer mask icon at the layer pallet (see the image below).

6. Select the linear gradient tool from the tool pallet. Ensure that foreground is black and background is white.

7. Ensure that you are still in the layer mask. Drag the gradient tool up in order to show the detail of the sky only.

You can also see at the layer pallet you have black mask over the Layer1. This step you need to do trail and error until you get the good transition between Layer1 and Background.

8. After masking, you can see that this photo has good details between the sky and they ground as if you use a Graduated ND filter.

If you have any comments or recommendations, please feel free to write on my blog.

Have a nice day.

You can see at the example below showing you before and after correction.

1. Go to tool pallet and select “Measure Tool”.

2. Draw the line along the horizon or anything that is supposed to be straight.

3. Go to Image>Rotate Canvas>Arbitrary

4. It shows how tilted angle is and you simply click OK, no need to do something with it.

5. Select crop tool from the tool pallet. You may select your aspect ratio to match with your original ratio such as width 3, Height 2. Then select an area where you want to crop.

6. Press enter and that is !!!

1. Copy background layer. You drag your “Background” layer over the new layer icon in order to duplicate “Background” Layer.

2. Select Gaussian Blur filter from Adobe Photoshop Filter. Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur

3. Adjust Radius to 70. You can try to change this parameter until you are satisfied with it.

4. Change mode to Screen Mode.

5. Adjust brightness with Curve Adjustment. You can select the curve adjust from layer pallet. Please see the image below.

6. Adjust the curve until you like how brightness of your photo is.

That is !!!. It’s so simple, isn’t it?

Please feel free to give me comments so I can improve my post again next time.

Ps, according to this post, I used Adobe Photoshop CS2; therefore, the interface may be different from new version of Adobe Photoshop such as Adobe Photoshop CS3 or CS4 but the concept is the same.

Please see the before and after shot as shown below.

I use this photo for this example.

1. Hold and drag “Background Layer” over the new layer icon in order to duplicate the “Background Layer”. After duplicating, you will see “Background Layer Copy” on top of “Background Layer”

2. Select Radial Blur (Filter>Blur>Radial Blur)

3. Input 100 for amount

Blur Method is zoom.

Quality is Good.

Moreover, you need to move the Blur Center to where your light origin is. For this example, I move the blur center to NW a little bit. Then click OK.

4. You will see your photo after applying the radial blur filter. If you think that the radial blur is not enough for you, you can apply this filter until you are happy with the result.

5. Go to a layer pallet and change a layer style from Normal to Lighten and adjust layer opacity to 90%.

6. Click a layer mask icon to create a new layer mask

7. Select brush from a tool pallet and ensure that you select black as foreground color.

8. Change brush size according to your area in a photo.

9. Paint black to mask undesired areas. For this photo, I mask the bottom part of the photo. If you don’t like masking that you just do, you can change foreground color to white and paint on the area you want to recover details.

10. Look better, doesn’t it?

11. Hold and drag a “Background Layer Copy” over the new layer icon in order to duplicate the “Background Layer Copy”.

12. Change a layer style from Lighten to Vivid Light and adjust layer opacity to 20%. This step is for increasing the contrast of light.

That is : )

1. Use Tilt&Shift lens. With this option, you can correction the perspective completely straight from your camera but Tilt&Shift lens is very costly.

2. Use Adobe Photoshop. I normally use Adobe Photoshop to cope with this problem.

On this post, I will share the easy way to use Adobe Photoshop to correct perspective due to wide angle lens.

1. This photo was taken with the ultra wide angle lens and you can see that the buildings are not straight due to the effect of lens.

2. Go to Filter> Distort > Lens Correction

3. Adjust Vertical Perspective and Horizontal Perspective until your photo is straight. With assistance of the vertical grid lines provide by this filter, you can easily see how both vertical perspective and horizontal perspective affect your adjustment. For this example, I used -54 for Vertical Perspective and -9 for Horizontal Perspective. Then press OK.

4. Select “Crop” tool from the tool pallet in order to crop only usable section. You can see that this method you will lose details of photo.

5. That is ^__^ It’s so simple.