Photoshop Tutorials: Enhance Colors With Photoshop's Photo Filter
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I'm done with enhancing the colors in the sky and now I want to do the same thing with the ground but using a different color, so for that, I'll use a second Photo Filter adjustment layer.
Just as I did with the sky though, before I go adding the new adjustment layer, I need to first select the ground. Since I've already selected the top portion of the image (the sky) and now I want to select everything below it, all I need to do is load my original sky selection and then invert it. To do that, I'm going to hold down my Ctrl (Win) / Command (Mac) key on my keyboard and click on the Photo Filter's layer mask thumbnail in the Layers palette:
If you look closely at the layer mask thumbnail, you'll notice that the top portion of it is white while the bottom portion is black. The white area on top is the selection I made around the sky before I added the adjustment layer, and because it's white, that means the Photo Filter is affecting that area, which we saw quite obviously in the image. The area on the bottom filled with black means that the adjustment layer is not affecting that area, which is why the ground was not tinted with the magenta color.
By "Ctrl-clicking" (Win) / "Command-clicking" (Mac) directly on the layer mask's thumbnail, I've loaded my original selection back into the image:
Currently, the sky is selected, but I want everything below it to be selected instead. All I need to do is invert the selection, and I can do that easily with the keyboard shortcut Shift+Ctrl+I (Win) / Shift+Command+I (Mac). This causes everything that was selected to become deselected, and everything that was not selected previously is now selected. In other words, I've basically flipped the selection so that now the ground is selected and the sky is not:
The only problem here is that not only have I selected the ground, I've also selected the small area of water over on the left which I don't want to be affected by either of my Photo Filters. I can easily fix that though after I warm up the colors on the ground so I won't worry about it for now.
Step 5: Add The Second Photo Filter Adjustment Layer
With my selection in place, I can add my second Photo Filter adjustment layer, and I'll do that the same way I did before, by clicking on the New Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette:
Again, I'll select Photo Filter from the list that appears:
Photoshop adds my second Photo Filter adjustment layer above the first one in the Layers palette and pops up the Photo Filter dialog box just as before.
Step 6: Select The Color You Want To Use
I want the ground in the photo to appear a lot warmer, which means I'll want to add a warm color like orange to it. Fortunately, warming and cooling images is exactly what Photoshop's Photo Filter was originally designed for, and rather than choosing "Orange" from a list of colors or from the Color Picker, I can simply use the default filter, which is "Warming Filter (85)":
There's two other warming filters included - "Warming Filter (LBA)" and "Warming Filter (81)" - but after experimenting with all three, the first one seems to give me the best results with this image. The "Density" value, which as we saw a moment ago determines how much of the color is mixed in with the image, is set to 25% by default and that's not nearly enough to warm up my image, so I'm going to click on its slider and drag it to the right, keeping an eye on my image as I drag so I can see a live preview of what I'm doing, and I'm going to increase the Density value all the way to around 85% to match the same color intensity as the sky above it:
I'm going to click OK to exit out of the dialog box, and here's my image after warming up the ground:
As I mentioned earlier, the only problem now is that I've warmed up the area of water on the left which I didn't want to do, so I'll fix that next.