How To Enhance A Sunset Photo #1

There are many ways to enhance a sunset photos, lots of fun. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to use GIMP’s Curves to adjust the color of a sunset photo. We will bring the hidden Red color up, and make it becomes more interesting.

Before

Original sunset photo before the color adjustment.
[ Photo by ceonyc / cc by-sa 2.0 ]

After

Sunset photo after the color adjustment.
[ Edited by favorizer.net / licensed as per original photo ]

[ This tutorial is for The GIMP, you may apply similar steps in Photoshop ]

Sunsets are beautiful, however most of the time, camera fails to capture the beauty. Sometime, the interesting part of photography happen in the darkroom, and today’s darkroom is our computer.
Unlike photoshop, GIMP2 do not have adjustment layers. So, what we can do in GIMP is to duplicate the background layer & use Curve to adjust the color. So open up the photo & get it ready for editing in GIMP.

STEP 1

Click on the “Duplicate Layer” icon at the bottom of the Layers Dialog to duplicate a layer from the original image. We keep the original background layer at the bottom of the layers stack, this is to allow us to get back the original photo quickly just in case if something goes wrong on the working layers. Name the new layers to “L1″ if you wish.

STEP 2

Call up the “Adjust Color Curves” dialog ( Menu : Colors > Curves ). Change the Channel to Red & make the curve look like as above. As you can see from the above image, we have brought up the red color in the sunset.

STEP 3

Call up the “Adjust Color Curves” dialog again. Make the “Value” curve look like above. This will then darken the photo slightly.

DONE !

That’s it. In fact we can further apply layer mask to the layers. Anyway, we discuss about layers mask for another tutorial. Have fun!