I freely admit that I know next to nothing about channels in Photoshop, and I know that entire books have been written about them. I should probably invest in at least one. Today I took some time to experiment a little.
Original image
I didn’t really have any notion of what I wanted to accomplish, so I just started moving sliders around and seeing what would happen. I thought I’d have more presets to study so I could learn from them, but apparently I didn’t install them.
Adding brightness to red channel and adjusting the mask
The book gave me a few ideas, so I started there. Adding brightness from both the Green and Blue channels to the Red channel gave a bit of a “walking on Mars” look. I was able to tone that down by painting the mask on the adjustment layer. Still looks like an alien landscape, but at least she still has a white dress.
Then I started with a grayscale and added back a tiny bit of red for a more appealing sunrise look.
Grayscale with a hint of red
ooo! I like this. Channels are a mystery to me, too. The only “Channel” trick I know is on removing a background by adding a new layer in the channels section, converting it to black and white and selecting the image. it’ll grab certain parts of the image and while it’s selected, you can move back to the Layers and fill, delete, etc. to do what you need to. (That’s sort of a quick run-down of this tutorial – works really well for that kind of thing.)
Thanks, Shelly! I bookmarked that tutorial too. So much to learn!
Good job! I like your final result and also really like your source image. If stock, could you share the stock photo site where you found it?
Thanks, Ilene. The image is from Dreamstime. I believe the number is 1140520. I got it a long time ago, so I’m not sure if they still have it.