Years ago (when I was shooting film), I lived in Southeast Asia for a few years. This picture from colinp over at Fotolia.com, even though it was taken in China, reminds me of the times I visited Bali, Indonesia. Knowing that it will take me forever before I can dig through my shots of rice fields, find one I like and then scan it, I thought that this would be a great photo to show off a few landscape-specific effects in PhotoTools Professional Edition.
Original photo
Like usual, the first effect I added to my stack in PhotoTools was the Kubota Daily Multi-Vitamin effect to give a nice contrast to the image. I followed that with another effect by Kevin Kubota called Radiance Landscape set to the Reduced option. This effect will boost the colors without softening or glowing - which is funny because I’m going to do that separately in a moment…
To these two effects, I added the onOne Spring Enhancer. This enhances only the greens in the photo. I dialed the strength of the effect way back as at 100 percent it was just too much. Be sure to play with the Fade slider to adjust the strength of an effect if you don’t like it by default.
The final two steps I added were to add a Diffuse Glow effect created by Jack Davis. I liked how this softened up some of the details in the water (which might be hard to see in these reduced web files) and gave it a bit of dreamy look which is how I remember my time being a tourist in Bali. To finish the photo off, I added Jack’s Grungy Noise effect to the top of my stack to give the photo a bit of noise or simulated film grain like my photos would have (if I could go find them!). Here’s the final processed file.
Processed with PhotoTools Professional Edition
The photo used in this example was provided to onOne Software courtesy of Fotolia.com.
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[...] little over a month ago, I posted a free PhotoTools preset called Radiant Spring for everyone to download. It was primarily for enhancing a landscape shot that contained a lot of [...]