[JMitchell]

Hi guys!

This tutorial was sparked by an edit I did for water in the sharing section of the site, where I removed a blue / purple effect on the distant mountains, caused by Ultra (yes, you guessed it) violet light.
This tutorial will take you through the easy method in a step by step process, which should be easy to follow. I'm using CS3, but it should be the same for all versions of photoshop, and perhaps elements, plus the same principles apply in other popular editing softwares.

Right. Water I hope you don't mind me using your image as an example, because it's a very good one!

Our original image looks like this:




So, what we need to do is first of all DUPLICATE THE LAYER (CTRL + J), which should then look like this in the layers palette:



Then, it's time to do the colour adjustment. Make a COLOUR ADJUSTMENT LAYER from the drop down layer at the bottom of the layers palette:



Now for the settings. Usually, it is pretty clear to tell what is right and what isn't. Ignore the rest of the image, and just focus on the blue bits, and move the slider with "Yellow" at one end and "Blue" at the other away from blue until it looks 'normal' in the previously blue parts of the image. You can slightly adjust some of the other colours if necessary.

I used settings like this for this picture:



Now the image will look perfect around the bits you wanted to change, but way too saturated - or just odd - everywhere else.

This means it's time for a LAYER MASK. First, what I do is I merge down (CTRL + E) the colour adjustment layer into the duplicated layer, then create a layer mask on that merged layer (Fig. 1), and it should look like Fig. 2 (sorry, image for CTRL + E is a little confusing, you have to select the colour balance layer and press CTRL + E):





Now select a soft, wide brush, and press "\". This has activated 'quick mask mode', in which you can see exactly where you've painted the layer mask to be visible and invisible, because those areas are either a red transparency or not.



Use a black brush to paint over the areas you DO NOT want to show (they should come up in red transparent), until your picture looks something like this:



Now, press '\' again, and the image should return to normal, but with all your lovely painting work having made the image look perfect, like this!






Thanks,

and any questions, put them in this thread.
I hope this has been useful, and will stop you having to shell out for a UV filter to reduce this effect, unless of course you think you should always have one on anyway


Jack

[silkstone]

Thanks for that Jack - great stuff! Rep points added.

[water]

Merci buckets for this one

[j sotelo]

Used this one today,

[JMitchell]

Thanks guys, glad you found it useful