A little help would be greatly appreciated

[rxdan]

I am new to photo editing and am a little stumped as to how to go about turning my wishes into reality for this photo. I would like to give the sky a little more blue and maybe increase the contrast of the clouds. I would also like to sharpen the image, but more so the island in the background and not over sharped the already sharp features in the front. I would greatly appreciate any thoughts as to the steps I should take to improve this photo. I am using PS Elements 2 with Hidden Power. The link above will take you to a site where a bigger file of it is located (2MB). Feel free to use it if you would like to. If you want the full .psd file to work on, let me know and I will send it to you. Right now it is about 14MB. Thank you in advance for all your input. All comments are welcome.

Dan

[d_kendal]

hope this is what you were going for. this is pretty rough as I was just seeing what I could do for it quickly, but here's the steps I took:
Duplicate original layer, then add a mask on the second layer. on the new layer, and mask off the whole sky and background areas (you can mask them off both as seperate layers if you want to adjust them seperately to get a cleaner result, I did a very rough mask as you can see by the fuzzyness in between layers ) then I applied a simple curves correction (an S curve usually works nicely for better contrast) then I used the unsharp mask filter between low and mid level for all settings to sharpen it a little. I have attached the result I got. I'm sure theres better (althogh more complex) ways to get the effect you're going for, but this was the best "quick fix" I could think of off the top of my head.
- David

[Leah]

I did this using Elements 1 and not using any Hidden Power tools - I suspect that there is stuff in Hidden Powers (layer masks?) that would make this more flexible and closer to the way I would do it in Photoshop (which is basically what David did, using layer masks and adjustment layers with layer masks).

Duplicated background layer. Did a +10 saturation adjustment on this new layer, and then a Levels adjustment, dragging the left-hand slider to the right until the sky and island looked about right.

Then selected just the sky and island, which involved a lot of cutting around the poles sticking up from the foreground - a bit fiddly but not actually difficult - inverted the selection so that the foreground areas were now selected - applied a small amount of Feather to the selection (I used just one pixel on the small-scale image, obviously a little more might be appropriate on the high res image) and then hit Delete to delete the foreground from the top, levels-adjusted, layer. You can tweak the opacity of the top layer at this point.

I didn't sharpen because at this resolution the boost in contrast that Levels had given also made the background look sharper. If that's not the case at higher resolution, you could also apply some sharpening to the top layer (I would suggest duplicating it and then applying the sharpening to the new top layer to give yourself more flexibility).

[Abaxoo]

Very nice picture rxdan.

[Abaxoo]

Just for fun

[Leah]

Abaxoo, Can you explain how you did those in Elements (or how they could be done in Elements)?

[rxdan]

Thanks to everybody for their input, the pictures look great. I am looking forward to working on the picture later today. I also have the same request as Leah for Abaxoo. Could you please list the steps you used in creating the pictures? The one just for fun is very cool. I am guessing it involves a gradient map of some kind applied selectively. Thanks again!

Dan

[Leah]

I'm guessing it involves an entirely new sky...

[Abaxoo]

It was a joke of course this is a new sky.

I'm not using Element but only Paint Shop Pro.

[LQQKER]

What I did was ran a curves adjustment first to capture the correct colors and bring out some detail. Added a slight blue gradient to the sky and adjusted the contrast to have the photo pop a bit (say that 10 times fast )
I went a little heavy on the gradient to emphasize the sky, but this can be adjusted to taste.
I used some Nik filters to bring out some additional color (polorization, and skylight).
I made no attempt to sharpen the picture seeing it was such low resolution.

[catia]

Hi,

I did this a couple of days ago and forgot to post it.

I duped the BG and ran the JtD Polarizer 2 CM action (from DPReview Actions v06a). Set the opacity of the new layer to 100% and added a mask and painted the lower half of the image back in.

Catia

[Mike Needham]

Loved the initial picture and thought it deserved some retouching to bring it out even more. Here's what I did.

Duplicated the layer twice and hid the top layer.

The water in the foreground lacked definition so I added a curves adjustment layer to bring out some of the blue better and define some of the ripples better. I added a layer mask with a b&w gradient to effect only the water.

I then added a rosy hue to the sky and the background to give it some dynamism. I realise that I have strayed from the true image, but I thought a bit of artistic liscence was called for to really make the sky stand out. I used a technique similiar to using a traditional lens filter. Again I masked out the bottom half.

The top layer was revealed and a high pass filter of 10 with a blend mode of soft light at around 66% opacity was added.

Flattened and saved for web - JPG 50% quality to comply with forum reg's (lost some quality in the flattening)

Great photo though, The background almost looks like a picture postcard rather than an actual photo. Blew me away.