Fairy Castle C&C

sensibleken

Hi all. i took the following at the weekend at the fairy castle on top of two rock in the dublin mountains.

im kinda happy with it but i think the foreground is too dark compared to sky. any ideas how i could bring out the foreground a little without messing up the sky? i use CS4 by the way. all constuctive criticism welcome

Thecageyone

Love the sky

Use the dodge tool to lighten the foreground. There's tonnes of simple tutorials online. Though I wouldn't lighten the foreground that much, more put areas of lightened shadows across it. You could enhance the rocks with dodge and burn tools too, a bit of creative light and shadow here and there, like shading a sketch I think the rocks need more light than the greenery.

Good starting point to work on though IMHO :cool:

sNarah

I love the tones and composition, the only thing that annoys me is the wee little white spots (sunglare?), I think they should be cloned out.

sensibleken

Thecageyone wrote: »

Love the sky

Use the dodge tool to lighten the foreground. There's tonnes of simple tutorials online. Though I wouldn't lighten the foreground that much, more put areas of lightened shadows across it. You could enhance the rocks with dodge and burn tools too, a bit of creative light and shadow here and there, like shading a sketch I think the rocks need more light than the greenery.

Good starting point to work on though IMHO :cool:

cheers for that. i never went near dodge and burn as i had no idea what they did. definetely give it a go though:)

sensibleken

sNarah wrote: »

I love the tones and composition, the only thing that annoys me is the wee little white spots (sunglare?), I think they should be cloned out.

cheers. yeah its a bit of sun flare. i thought id leave it in because i thought it gave the image a bit of a mystical light feel (it being fairy castle and all), and also so people didnt think i photoshopped the hell out of it...which im intending to do wahahaha

magicbastarder

the halo around the fort is a little off-putting.
generally what i do (which is not necessarily a good thing to follow) is to use the freehand tool select to select the bottom or the top and feather the selection quite a bit - never less than 100 pixels, and often 255 (which is the max allowed), and then use, say, the curves tool. you can invert the selection to work on the other half. makes the creation of those halo effects less likely.

sensibleken

magicbastarder wrote: »

the halo around the fort is a little off-putting.
generally what i do (which is not necessarily a good thing to follow) is to use the freehand tool select to select the bottom or the top and feather the selection quite a bit - never less than 100 pixels, and often 255 (which is the max allowed), and then use, say, the curves tool. you can invert the selection to work on the other half. makes the creation of those halo effects less likely.

thanks. i havent a clue how to feather (im useless at ps) ill look up a tutorial on it though. thanks again

magicbastarder

feathering just blurs the boundary of the selection, so it's not an abrupt change from selected pixels to unselected. i think it's under 'refine selection', but i don't have PS to hand...