3.28. The color landscape
As digital photography appeared on the horizon in the 1980s, film technology was also improving rapidly, changing the style of color landscape photography. Though no one ever wrote a song in its praise, some people refer to the "Velvia-like," highly saturated colors of Fuji's transparency film. As instantly recognizable as the cooler tones of earlier Kodachrome film, such color could also now be reproduced in print and on papers like Ilford's Cibachrome. The world had suddenly grown much more colorful.
The rich colors of 1990s landscape photography were not just due to film, of course, but to photographers' skill and their thoughtful use of lens filters. Warm-up filters change the white balance, which is easy to do to a digital image on a computer. But polarizing filters present another problem because they eliminate reflected light. This deepens the colors, something Photoshop can do in several different ways, but can also eliminate interesting reflections and make the picture lifeless. Cloning away such reflections is possible, but you might decide not to do sosometimes you just need to swivel the lens filter so you get just the right amount of polarization that leaves key reflections intact.
I used a wide-angle lens for this picture. Its unusually shaped front element prevented me from using a polarizing filter.
A quick way to create punchier colors is to add a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and drag the Saturation slider to the right. This works with some pictures, but can produce unnatural results. Here I marginally improved the sky's blue, but the rooftop became a garish red. An alternative method is to adjust individual colors in the Hue/Saturation dialog box. For the sky, reset the Master Saturation to 0% and experiment with just the Blue and Cyan. To remove oversaturated color from areas like this building, create a mask using Layer > Layer Mask > Reveal All. Select the Brush tool (shortcut B), soften its edges with Shift + [, and paint black onto the Hue/ Saturation layer's mask. For a stronger effect, duplicate the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. This improves the sky, but causes unpleasant posterization elsewherea sure sign that for this project, Hue/Saturation really isn't the best approach.
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First, make the colors more vivid. Rather than using Hue/ Saturation (see left), add a Selective Color adjustment layer, select the color you want to saturate, and push its Black slider up to 100%. I changed the Blue and Cyan. Strengthen the effect by duplicating the Selective Color adjustment layer as many times as you wish. Here, I pressed Ctrl/Cmd + J a few times and made my skies a rich blue. Other tones remained unaffected. To simulate a warming filter, add a Photo Filter adjustment layer at the top of the layer stack. You don't normally want this to be too obvious, so stick to low-density values. For a digital graduated filter, hold down the Alt/Opt key and click the Layers palette's "Create a new layer" icon. Set the new layer's Mode to Overlay and tick "Fill with Overlay-neutral color." The next step is to paint on the Overlay layer. Here I felt the picture was slightly unbalanced, and used the Gradient tool to add black to the top left of the layer. This creates a stronger effect in the darker corner, simulating using a grad filter at an angle.
The great thing about using Photoshop to apply a polarized, Velvia look is that you can choose not to clone out interesting reflections like those in the water, and you can saturate the color in areas like the sky. A polarizing lens would remove the reflections whether you liked it or not.
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