Tutorial - after

http://www.soffia.net

Hi guys.
I´ve been getting many emails where people are asking me how
I work my photos
so I thought you´d like a tutorial.

Well, this is the first time I do a tutorial. I hope
it makes sence. If you find this helpful
I ´ll try to find a photo that needs a massive
work, and do another one, with more steps and screenshots.
This tutorial is made with Photoshop version 8.0, and a basic
knowledge to do this tutorial helps.


STEP 1
duplicate layer, name it sky

STEP 2
with layer we called sky, go to
IMAGE - AJUSTMENTS - LEVELS
and put in the numbers
68
1,38
255


go to IMAGE - AJUSTMENTS - hue saturation
-12
-55
0


STEP 3
name the background layer mountain (turn off the sky layer)
go to IMAGE - AJUSTMENTS - LEVELS

49
1,03
217

STEP 4
turn on sky layer, and with that layer selected, erase everything but the sky

STEP5
duplicate sky layer, name it blur

go to filter - blur - gaussian blur 8,4%


STEP 6
erase everything but the blue tones with a soft brush to make the clouds in focus
and bring down the opacity of the brush at some points

STEP 7
merge sky layer and blur layer and name it sky
at the sky layer go to:

levels
44
1,00
255

hue-sat and change Cyans, blues and master.
Cyans
-5
-38
0

blues
-7
-28
0

master
0
-18
0

STEP 8
go to mountain layer

levels
31
1,00
255

at last I put on a radical gradient
with 50% opacity, to do the vignette
(make new gradient from gray to white, with
opacity at ca 70% on the gray part)
This is what I basically do, with some
images I duplicade layers again and again
to ajust the levels, and the hue sat untill I´m
happy. I sometimes use gaussian blur at the sky
if it´s noise after all the ajustments, and then
erase the clouds part to get the focus.