In Photography, you focus to expose one part of the picture, the part you want most of the time. The part that is in focus is the part that will be best exposed. However, what happens when you are shooting scenery, and you have trees, foreground, the sky etc. etc. Well, if you have a dark room, you can do what's called a Full Dynamic Range technique, in other words, cheat and expose all of the picture right. You can't do that really with digital cameras, alas, but you can with Photoshop. Find your pic, and let's roll.
I took this in my back yard last winter, the sunset was really beautiful. As you can see, the red, close to the trees is exposed nice, mainly because the trees and that part was in focus. Now, I want to make the sky more blue, and expose it better. So, this is how it's gonna work...
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As you can see, the top of the sky is a dull and bland grey. Let's make it happier :)
Duplicate the layer, and take your rectangle selection tool (M), and then select the top half, going until the color just starts to get a hint of red, the purple part. Feather than then by 50, or a number around there, then Select the Inverse, and delete it.
This is what I got, with my BG layer hidden:
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Now, if you made your BG layer not visible, make it visible again, and with the top half layer selected, go to Image, then Adjustments, then Hue/Saturation.
A box will pop up. In the bottom corner, make sure the 'Colorized' box is checked. These are my settings, but you can use what you want, I guess, but since the sky is blue (everyone knows that :P) I dont know why you'd use something else. However, this technique is not limited to this one thing, so other times you will use different colors.
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Alright, and now set the top layer mode to Overlay. This keeps the branches nice and dark, and sharp. I guess you can do whatever you want, but this is just the way I do my technique. Now, you're done. This is what I've got, and it's much nicer than the other one with the bland sky. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial, and that you will put it to good use!
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