Post-Processing in Photoshop Elements

Boogieman and I were out shooting together this morning. We were in an area with woods and a creek and lots of interesting weeds. :)

I'll post more shots later, as well as a learning that I had (yay), but I thought I'd post my approach to post-processing all these woods and tree shots that I take with this particular shot of woods and sky. I'm sure there is much more that I have to learn and can do with PS Elements, but this is my standard approach until I learn better.

First, without any post-processing:


f/22, 1/50 SEC, 50 MM, ISO-640

I almost always use auto levels, and I often use auto contrast and auto color. Sometimes I don't like what the contrast and color corrections do to the shot. It just depends. For shots of trees and woods, I usually use all three.

Auto levels, contrast, and color:


My next trick is to darken the highlights (on the same sidebar with all the other quick fixes). I just love the way it warms up the images and makes them closer to what my eye sees.

Darken highlights:


I'm still having challenges with an overexposed sky (not terribly, but still not what I want) in my landscape shots. One way that I've minimized it is to only include a small section of sky in my shots, as I did in this shot.

The other thing that can be done is to burn (with the sponge tool in PS Elements), or darken, the sky section of the image. The change is subtle, but I think it improves the image a bit. (Well damn, I don't even think you can see the difference in the uploaded versions, but I promise you I can on my originals.)

Burn tool on sky at 5%:


The other solution to different exposures for land and sky shots that I just read about is a graduated density filter. I'm planning on adding this to my arsenal very soon, since I am forever taking these kinds of shots.

Notes:

Location - Watkins Mill Road
Time - 9 AM