Photoshop Friday

Hmmm, where did that week go? Well, I am going to cut back on blogging to this site... I am going to try 1 or 2 a week. That's probably enough to ruminate on anyway.

Photo today is one we took in Zion National Park on a canyon called Mystery.
This shot was taken by my friend who had a great little PAS camera. The quality of these images was fabulous, but the vibrance of colors was lacking.

If you have photoshop CS3 or CS4 they have included, in Camera Raw, a similar function called Vibrance next to the Saturation slider. For some landscape shots, and if you don't have CS3 or 4, this little action is great. Here is the download

Let's take this image from our trip...


When I apply that action, it makes 3 additional layers... each one having more vibrance. Click off of the 3 square boost for this image. You will see a little better balance. Now change the layer opacity down to about 55%... your layers palette should look like this...


And you image now should look like this...

And this vibrance shift really illustrates the true colors of that wall. We were in awe... and it's nice when you can more closely match that brilliance.
SIDE NOTE: The LabBoost1square is just 1 square instead of 3. If I use this technique with portraits, I only hit them with 1 square, so I made this action for portraits.

Pick of the day--
found on flickr
This shot was taken with a PAS camera but they used an f-stop of 4 which led to the nice depth of field. Well done with a PAS camera. These were just below the top of Timp