LOCAL ADJUSTMENT

Transform your images with these powerful edits and get to grips with invaluable masking skills

USE SELECT SKY WITH GRADIENTS

►►In landscape photos the sky tends to come out brighter than the land, so a simple edit to darken and boost the area can help to balance out your outdoor scenes. The Select Sky command is a game changer when it comes to enhancing skies. We can simply click Select Sky then use the tonal sliders, perhaps by decreasing Exposure to darken the area, then by boosting Clarity to enhance cloud detail and Saturation to give the colours more impact. However, sometimes making edits like this over the entire sky can create an unnatural-looking transition with the land below. If so, it helps to fade out the effect along the horizon with the Linear Gradient tool. Simply click Subtract, choose the Linear Gradient tool and drag up from land to sky to fade out the effect along the horizon.