A Little Trip and a Little Tip

Lexis Godmother Dee invited us to camp and check out their new property outside of St. George. It was beautiful! Their new filly is so adorable too! While we were so close we took a side trip to Zion ~ which I think is THE most beaUTiful place in the world ~ We had a great time and Edward had a fun time playing during a little photo shoot. He is Handsome as always but the sky turned out looking pretty bad, white instead of the pretty blue it was. In steps my best photo fixing friend PS2!

To fix the sky, I want to brush it with blue. With my magic wand tool set to a tolerance of 50 this is the selection I get. Obviously this looks even worse than the white sky did! If I were to keep my tolerance set at 50 which is what I use most of the time, I would never be able to get all the nooks and crannies between the branches, it would select them too and I wouldn't be able to paint over it without turning the branches blue too!

So without further delay, my little tip is to lower the tolerance to whatever works for your situation, in this case I went down to 15. Once you set your tolerance this low, it would take forever to pick up the whole sky so start by selecting with a higher tolerance, then drop it down and hold the shift key down while clicking on those teeny tiny spaces. For something intricate this can take a little patience, but I use this technique on most projects I use the magic wand tool on which is a lot! :) I zoom in so those intricate details are nice and big, making seeing them (and clicking on the right spots) tons easier! Another thing I like to do when painting a selection is using many hues of the same color in low transparency's, brushing over the same areas with a large brush many times.

On this photo, I did not spend as much time with the colors and so not totally loving the color of the sky but I hope it illustrates the technique pretty well... I did hit the photo up with the burn and dodge tools a little to finish it off.