Editing a Silhouette Sunset Tutorial

Step 1

Open the image you wish to use in Photoshop raw. It is important to choose your best image as you have no doubt shot dozens. Try to look for ones without anything obstructing the sky, such as birds, or airplanes.

Ideally you will have shot in a RAW format and it will open in the Camera Raw dialogue box by default, but if you have shot in jpg or some other format, simply select File>Open, select your image, and in the "format" drop down, select "Camera Raw". (not to be confused with "Photoshop Raw")

Step 2

The image in question has fairly decent exposure, but if your's does not, simply fix the exposure as you would with a normal photo. After you have done this, it is time to bump up the contrast. The best way to make a sunset sillhouette "pop" is to increase the contrast. You want that black horizon to be as black as it can be and you want the sky to be as bright and radient as you can get it. I usually push the exposure up by about 20% but it really depends on the image.

What you are looking for is a crisp dark horizon with a nicely detailed sky.

Step 3

Next, you want to increase the vibrance of your image. This will help make the colors jump out more and draw better attention. Generally I avoid using the Saturation setting as I find it makes the image feel "burnt". Bumping the vibrance up by 30-35 points, however, is perfect for making the color feel richer.

Step 4

Now it is time to get creative, you have to decide, what sort of colors do I want in the final Image. For this example I decided I wanted to go with a piece that focuses on Pinks and Purples and has a very "royal" feel to it.

Thus the first thing I did was crank up the tint into the regions of magenta. Since I was really going for a "pink" feel I added quite a bit of magenta tint, this is not always necessary but works nicely in this case.

Step 5

Now, as you can see, the image is a wee bit warm and the warmth is clashing with the rich pink tones. Thus I used the temperature slider to draw back the warmth of the image to give the whole piece a more "royal" feel.

Step 6

Now it is time to really play with specific colors. Tint and Temperature are great for pointing things in the right direction but it is in the "Camera Settings tab" that you can really control the color.

In the Camera Settings tab you are presented with a new "tint" slider. Although this one tints between Magenta and Green, rather than Magenta and Yellow. Mostly you can ignore this as you have already tinted your image.

Next you will see 3 sets of 2 sliders, each set reflects either red green or blue, and through the 2 sliders you can control the tint of those tones and also their saturation. Play with them as much you would like, experiment and find the look that is best for you.

Step 7

And now finally, your color editing is done, it is time to open the image up in Photoshop so hit "open image". As you will probably notice, depending on how much you changed the color, a significant amount of noise has arisen. Have no fear though as the great thing about the sky is that you can heavily remove noise and it still looks great.

Launch up the Reduce Noise filter (Filters>Noise>Reduce Noise) and bump up the settings until the previous is looking fairly smooth. Try to preserve the details around 50% and don't go too heavy on the sharpening. Once it looks pretty good, hit "ok".

Your Done!

Yup, your done, you can now save it, re-size it, and do whatever else you do to images once they are complete. I hope you have enjoyed this tutorial and if you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below.