Keeping Focus Where You Want It Using Focal Point 2 and Color Fill Adjustment Layer
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The above was shot in the early evening in the Lagoon Area at the Hilton Waikoloa Village – very near the Dolphin Learning Center. This is an HDR image processed in Nik’s HDR Efex Pro using three images. In my last blog OnOne’s Focal Point 2 (see sidebar for OnOne’s website link) was shown on a beautiful flower shot (see “Let’s Focus on OnOne’s Focus Point 2 – Nice Little Plug-in!“).
This time I wanted to show how pretty it works on a landscape. The Focus Bug was used to keep the lounge chairs in focus and the Focus Brush was used to keep the thatched umbrella in focus. Also a very nice dark vignette was added from inside the plug-in.
Here is a little tip on how to keep your highlights under control. In this case to keep the water highlights from becoming too dominant in the evening image, a Color Fill Adjustment Layer in any color was added, the layer masked filled with black (click on layer mask thumbnail and press backspace to fill with black), and then by double clicking on the adjustment layer color swatch, a dark blue color from the image water area was sampled so the fill color matches it. In the black layer mask, paint back with a very soft low opacity brush (between 10 and 30%) the areas you want darkened, in this case mainly the water areas around the lounge chairs – this is just a very subtle adjustment.
The last step involved adding a Curves Adjustment Layer to give a little darker feel to the image. That was it. To see the tonemapped image before the plug-in and color fill layers were added, hover over the image.
Give Focal Point 2 a try if you get chance (if you buy fine art photographer Vincent Versace’s book, “Welcome to Oz 2.0: A Cinematic Approach to Digital Still Photography with Photoshop,” the Focal Point 2 plug-in is a free download from the book which has good reviews. Also try using a Color Fill Adjustment Layer to reduce out-of-control highlights. It is a very simple technique that works very effectively!….Digital Lady Syd
