Enhancing the reflection - Dramatic way

Please suggest on how to enhance the image in a dramatic manner, the weather is DEAD cold & I want to show it. I'm new to PS as well

This is original.

Here's the failed attempt.

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Permalink Reply by David Wollum on September 26, 2011 at 1:38am

First of all, excuse the sloppy horizon/sky edit I made here. I was pressed for time and just wanted to provide an example of what a copy/paste sky might look like. If I had the time, I would blend the two together seamlessly. But... you get the idea.

The worst thing about the original shot is the washed out sky. Wanting to end up with a shot that looks dead and cold is fine. But without a sky, what you end up with is a shot that just looks incorrectly exposed. There are a few ways to fix this, but the BEST way is to fix it when you take the shot. Overcast skies are notorious for ending up overexposed. Our eyes pick up the detail, but our cameras don't have the dynamic range necessary. If the clouds are exposed correctly, the foreground is too dark and lacks detail. If the foreground is good, the sky gets washed out, as is the case here.

Its not a cheap fix, but it is easy. You need a graduated Neutral Density (ND) filter. Basically, a filter that is dark on top and fades to clear somewhere near the middle of the filter. Cokin makes a nice kit that comes in a sliding, rotating mount that you can move around to suit your needs. Google it.

I didn't have that, so I went for a fix in Photoshop. I only used 3 layers, (from bottom to top) Background, Layer 1 (an empty, blank layer) and Background Copy (a duplicate of the Background).

In Background Copy, I used the Magic Wand to select the white sky, which I then deleted. I used the Clone Stamp Tool to sample the reflection of the sky in the water at the bottom of the shot and paste it into the top of Layer 1. In my photos, I keep several sky shots that I can use to "drop into" shots with boring skies.

But, to make it look cold and dead, I flattened the layers and went into Image>Adjustments>HDR Toning. If you don't have PS5, use vibrance and saturation controls. Either way, you want to increase the vibrance ALMOST too far, then use the saturation slider to de-saturate the color to the point where it is ALMOST gone, but still there. You don't want to end up with a black & white photo... although... could work...