The photo I started with was okay, but nothing particularly interesting. The exposure was good, but the real scene was more dramatic. I’ve tried to recreate that scene the way I saw it. And, admittedly, enhance it to the way I wish I had seen it.

Step One – Shadows/Highlights

Duplicate the photo layer. Photoshop doesn’t yet have the ability to have Shadows/Highlights as an Adjustment Layer, so I like to keep a backup of the original photo for fine-tuning later on.

To give it a bit more of an HDR look (which is how our eyes see), I used the Shadows/Highlights tool . I kept the settings subtle to just bring a bit more detail into the clouds and to brighten the dark areas of the road and trees.

Step Two – Darken the Sky

Ensure your foreground colour is set to Black (press D to reset the colours to their Defaults)

Now add a Gradient Adjustment Layer . Set the gradient to “Foreground to Transparent”. I want the gradient to be going from black at the top to transparent at the bottom, so I’ve ticked “Reverse”.

Set this Adjustment Layer to Soft Light blend mode and now we have a nice dark sky. A similar effect could have been done by using a Graduated Filter on the camera when taking the photo, but a) I like the control and fine-tuning this offers and b) I don’t have a graduated filter (at least not one that fits my main lens).

Step Three – Super-Sharpen

Finally, to give the image more impact, I used some super-sharpening. My preferred method of sharpening (everyone seems to have their own way) is using the High Pass filter.

To use this, I needed to first flatten the image into a new layer above all the others (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E – a very useful shortcut!).

Then to Filters > Other (at the bottom) > High Pass. The amount depends on the size of your photo and the effect you want. A small number (0.5 or 1) is good for normal sharpening. But for this super-sharpening effect, I went with 50.

Now, you should have a mostly grayscale image with a bit of smudged colour. I prefer to keep it all grayscale, but sometimes the extra colour looks good. To remove the colour I use Ctrl+Shift+U.

Set this layer to Hard Light blend mode to see how it looks. Now, turn the layer off and on a few times to compare. The unsharpened version almost looks blurry by comparison! The difference is dramatic. Some people will like it, others might think it’s too much. You can (and I usually do) turn the opacity down to keep it subtle.

I don’t usually use that super-sharpening but for this photo it seemed to work well. The method also works well on more texture based photos.

In my original I used my vintage colour technique to adjust the colours further and tuned the opacity of layers to get it looking good to my eyes.

Hopefully this tutorial has given you a couple of new techniques to try out on your own photos. If you’ve used these techniques on one of your photos, I’d love to see what you have come up with – feel free to send me the link in the comments.

Obviously, the sky wasn’t quite as dramatic as in the photos, but it was a dark sky. The sky usually looks better when it’s darker in photos. That’s why graduated filters were made.

If you don’t have one of those, the easiest way to do that is to use a black-to-transparent linear gradient, set to Soft Light blend mode. In these photos, I’ve also added a bit of a HDR effect using the Shadows/Highlights tool and finished it off with some super-sharpening using Highpass with a Radius of 50px (then set that to Hard Light blend mode and removing the colour). Tutorial for that coming tomorrow.

A slight change of pace for me – a GIMP tutorial. I don’t use GIMP a lot but I’ve found a lot of my experience with Photoshop is transferable. This is one such case. In Photoshop I would have gone to Select > Color Range then used the selection as a layer mask.

In GIMP the process is similar. You just have to know where to look. Turns out it’s in Color > Color to Alpha. There you can choose a colour or use the eye dropper to sample from the image and that colour will be turned transparent.

This was all inspired by this work by the very talented Tordo on deviantART:

I was struck by the patterned sky and wanted to try it out on a photo. Since I was using Ubuntu at the time, I thought i’d see what GIMP could manage. Turns out, as described above, it managed rather well.

So today I decided to document the process in GIMP with a video tutorial. My first time recording a tutorial in Ubuntu, too – it went very smoothly. I might have to do more for GIMP in future.

Update

I’ve remade the tutorial with Photoshop. Same images and everything, just how you’d go about doing the same thing in Photoshop.