I’m sure most of us have taken landscape photos in one way or another. Most of the time you’ll notice you either get a flat-out image, washed out sky or very dark building/grounds. In this guide, I’m going to show a very simple editing process that can improve your skies and make it more dramatic.

The sample we’re going to use for this guide is this image of Berjaya Times Square I took somewhere in 2006:

I took this picture with my Fuji Finepix S9500 (which I have sold off to make way to DSLR). If you’ve read my previous guide on enhancing image with S-Curve and try it out on this photo, it’ll become pretty weird, something like this:

While this might look okay for some creative use, I personally don’t like it because it distorts the color of the building a little bit.

So how do we improve the overall image without distorting it in such a way?

The Luminence Control

We can do it by only touching the image’s luminence. Open up this image in Photoshop, and on your Layers Palette group, there is one tab called “Channels“. Click on this tab to bring up the Channels Palette.

Now hold down your Ctrl key (Command key for Macs) and click on the thumbnail in the “RGB” channel:

Hold down Ctrl (Command) key and click on this area on the RGB channel

You’ll notice that some part of the image will be selected. Now switch back to the Layers Palette and make a Layer via Copy (keyboard junkies can just press Ctrl/Command+J):

Select this new layer (just click on it), and then go to Image -> Adjustments -> Curves, and do a “U-Curve“, something like this:

Adjust the Curves until the sky appears as how you want it to be

Our image will be like this:

Finally, turn the layer into a clipping mask:

The Final Step

Finally, switch the layer’s blending mode to “Overlay” and adjust the Opacity of the Layer to reduce the effect to a point where it is reasonably good:

I find 70% opacity is good for this example. Here’s the final image, along with the original image compared side by side:

Hope this helps in improving your landscape images!

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