Photoshop User - USA (2020-10)

> PHOTOSHOP USER

>^ OCTOBER 2020

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› › HOW TO

Step 18: Select a bright purple color and switch your

Brush tool over to a basic soft round brush with a 30%

Flow in the Options Bar. This will allow you to make

multiple passes for more color application and control

(if you don’t have a tablet). Paint sparingly on the top

edges of the blurred green at first, and thicken the color

once you see the effect for which you’re going.

Again, take a look at some inspirational examples of

real aurora coloring to help guide where you’d like to see

more purple in your own image. Go wild and try a few vari-

ations; you can always take down the intensity using the

Purple layer’s Opacity setting.

to your own preference. Also, feel free to create several

Curves adjustment layers, and paint in the effect where it’s

needed around the image by using their accompanying

masks. Just be careful to keep it looking like night and not

day again!

FINAL GLOBAL ADJUSTMENTS

Once you have an aurora effect you’re enjoying, you can

now apply some final effects for coloring, saturation, and

other global adjustments to really make things pop and

sync with the rest of the image. We deliberately kept the

image a bit flat up to this point to resemble an image

straight from the camera, so we’re going to need some

contrast to start. And if you added a decent amount of

greens or purples in the sky, you’ll definitely need to have

some of that coloring across the landscape features, so

let’s do this!

Step 19: Begin with a new Curves adjustment layer inside

a layer group above everything else in the layer stack.

Name this group “FX” or something helpful for your

own reference. Within the Curves adjustment, c lick to

add two control points, one for keeping the darks dark

(as it is nighttime after all), and the other for boosting

the highlights, as the nighttime effect left things dynami-

cally lacking in general. Each image is different, so do this

Step 20: Now it’s time to paint in some green and

purples on the land or water, depending on what you

created in your own sky masterpiece. Do this by creat-

ing a new layer above the Curves adjustment layer(s)

and change its blending mode. While the Color blend-

ing mode will literally change the color of everything to

the new color you paint, sometimes it’s preferable

to change the color and brighten things up a bit with

nondestructive dodging, which means changing the

blending mode to Overlay in this case. Again, each image

is different, so try a few blending modes here for the

right look. Paint with a soft brush set to green at a low

Opacity here.