Photoshop Tutorials: Enhance Colors With Photoshop's Photo Filter
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To remove the warming color over the water, I'm going to simply paint it away using the Brush Tool.
All I need to do is paint with black over any areas where I want to hide the effects of the Photo Filter. Even though it will look like I'm painting directly on the image itself, I'll really be painting on the layer mask and anywhere you paint with black on a layer mask hides the layer from view (or in this case, hides the effects of the adjustment). First, I need my Brush Tool, so I'll grab it from the Tools palette:
I could also press B to select it with the keyboard shortcut.
I need to paint with black, so I need to set black as my Foreground color, since the Brush paints with whichever color you have set as the Foreground color. Currently the Foreground color is set to white and the Background color is set to black. To swap them, I'll press X on my keyboard and now black is my Foreground color. I can see this in the Foreground and Background color swatches near the bottom of the Tools palette (Foreground is the top left, Background is the bottom right):
Now I'm ready to paint away the warming color from the water. To change the size of my brush as I'm painting, I can use the left and right bracket keys on my keyboard. The left bracket key makes the brush smaller and the right one makes it larger. To make my brush edge harder or softer, I can hold down the Shift key as I press the left and right bracket keys. "Shift+left bracket" makes the brush edges softer, and "Shift+right bracket" makes them harder. I'm going to paint over the water and as I do, the original blue color returns:
I'll continue painting until I've brought all of the original water color back into the image, and here's the result:
At this point, we're done with our tinting and enhancing colors, but there's one more thing I'd like to do with this image. The contrast could use a little boost, so as a bonus step, let's quickly increase the contrast in the image using a Curves adjustment layer.
Bonus Step: Boosting The Contrast With A Curves Adjustment Layer
In this little bonus step (which is completely optional of course), I'm going to finish off my image by boosting the contrast using a Curves adjustment layer and what's commonly referred to as an S curve, named for no other reason than it's a curve in the shape of the letter "S" (sort of, anyway). Don't worry if you don't understand anything about Curves. All you need to know is how to click and drag with your mouse and you'll be able to use this technique to give all your images a nice contrast boost. First, make sure you have the top layer selected in the Layers palette, since we want to add this Curves adjustment layer above all our other layers. Then click on the New Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette and select Curves from the list:
Photoshop adds the adjustment layer and pops up the "Curves" dialog box. By default, you'll see a large 4x4 grid in the dialog box, and if that's what you're seeing, hold down your Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) key and click anywhere inside the grid, which will change it to a 10x10 grid:
See that diagonal line running from the bottom left corner to the top right corner? We're going to reshape it into more of an "S" which is going to boost the contrast in the image. To do that, click your mouse at or near the grid intersection point in the top right corner. You'll see a small black dot appear on the diagonal line where you clicked. Then either drag the dot slightly upward with your mouse or if you prefer, you can nudge it up by pressing the Up arrow key on your keyboard a few times. As you drag or nudge it higher, you'll see your image becoming brighter. Don't raise it too high though or you'll lose detail in the bright areas of your image. I'm going to press my Up arrow key 4 times to nudge it up just slightly:
Now let's do the exact opposite in the bottom left corner of the Curves grid. Click your mouse at or near the grid intersection point in the bottom left corner and either drag it down slightly with your mouse or nudge it down using the Down arrow key on your keyboard. However you choose to lower it, try to lower it by the same amount that you raised the point in the top right corner. As you lower the point, you'll see the diagonal line taking the form of an "S" and you'll see the dark areas in the image becoming darker. I'm going to use my Down arrow key 4 times to lower the point by the same amount I raised the other point:
When you're done, click OK to exit out of the Curves dialog box. We've now made the bright areas in the image brighter and the dark areas darker thanks to our "S curve" and boosted the overall contrast in the image. Without knowing anything more about how Curves works, you can now use that same technique to improve the look of all your images!
And with that, we're done! Here's my original image once again for comparison:
And here, after finishing things off with a slight contrast boost, is the final "enhanced color" result:
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