Project 1

This photo was taken in Anuktuvik Pass last summer. I spent a few hours there and it was an amazingly beautiful gorgeous super hot day but it was the worse time to take photos and I knew the antlers would be washed out. I had fun taking pictures though-for those of you who have been there you Sherri Adams photo Copyright 2007 know that it is all about majestic scenery in that area.
I played around in all the areas: color channels, histogram, sat/hue, shadows/highlights, variation fader,tint and color and gradients and settled on the following steps...


I tried the auto levels for tint and color and decided that I would go with the color level auto then I turned on the channels and chose the green channel to pump up the foliage, sky, and antlers as they were washed out. It still looked a little washed out so I then went to the brightness/contrast and lowered the Sherri Adams photo Copyright 2007
contrast significantly and the brightness as well...
Again, I went to the channels this time in RGB and adjusted the levels using the peaks and valleys in the histogram I darkened the light, slightly darkened the midtones and darks...the antlers needed alot of help...
I lessened the hues and then went to curves and chose the red channels and changed it a little to bring out the colors in the mountains as the mountains around there are amazing but due to it being high noon the colors did not really show up in the pictures...
I adjusted the shadows and highlights as well to bring some definition into the foliage and it brought them out more-I also increased the tonal as well....
The last thing I did was to bring a little more color into antlers as there were stark white-they had no color to begin with so it was difficult to isolate them but I went to the Curve command and chose to manipulate just the blue and that helped bring out the antlers as well as the sky....
I want to use the inverse of this photo next....so you will see me use this photo again as it's one of my favorites-when we get to the cropping stuff I will crop out some things....I considered "healing" the clouds-but they were not blemishes so I decided I would leave them....in the future I may or just may crop them out...
p.s.I tried the variations with the more cyan, more green etc. and just didn't like any of the options it gave...