affinity photo Landscape

[MartinL]

Ok, I have to admit the composition is not the best. But I still want to keep this photo and edit it. It's not the best sky for that spot during that week. The best one appeared while I was fishing so I couldn't go there to photograph it. The sky had more clouds, was darker with deep reds in them (for sunset). This photo was taken in the morning.

The first photo is the original. For the second one, I created a copy to remove the haze and added some local saturation. Added a curve layer, a lens profile layer (it made the image warmer), a HSL layer (+15% redand +20% yellow), vibrance layer (+13% vibrance and +9% saturation), luminosity/contrast layer (+3% luminosity and +7% contrast) and a vignette live filter.

For some reason, noise started showing up. Any idea what I did wrong?

[MartinL]

Ok... I tried redoing the entire project. Not sure what else I can do. This time, I removed the windmills, the houses, the birds and a log.

1. Removed the haze.
2. Added a clarity live filter.
3. I increased the exposure for the mountain using a graduated tool (from the botom of the mountain to the sky).
4. Added white balance.
5. Lens correction filter.
6. Added vibrance layer.
7. Added luminosity/Contraste layer.

I tried ading a HSL layer with no success (I couldn't increase the color of the sky without affecting the rest of the photo). There is still noise in the photo and I can't remove it.

[Smee Again]

Big improvement.

To apply HSL to only the sky, use the HSL layer's mask.

• Click on the HSL layer, then treat it like a layer mask.
• For your image's sky, you can probably get a pretty good selection with the selection brush. Fill the selection with a white to black gradient (white on top, black on bottom). Then deselect the area, and hit <CTR:> + I (I for Invert).
• Now double click on the HSL layer and adjust your colors as you wish. You also may want to experiment with the blend modes for the HSL layer as it can really make a difference.
• Remember that you can adjust the transparency of that HSL layer as weil.

Quick try ...

Yeah, color choices are poor, but just to show that you can boost only what you want by using the masking ability of the adjustment layers.

[MartinL]

@Smee Again

Here how it looks like now. I didn't try the gradient tool for the HSL adjustment yet.

 

[Smee Again]

Nice, but you lost the windfarm on the top of the mountain. Now that I'm home and no one looking over my shoulder, I had a few minutes to work with some gradient mapping, masking etc.

I'll post the image here and this is a link to the afphoto file that might give you a few ideas. Hope it helps.

[MartinL]

I cloned out the windfarm.

[Smee Again]

I saw that after my post. It was just weird to see little poles showing up as I was working on the image. I thought something was amiss on my end.

[GDPR-365024]

@MartinL

You're likely to obtain a better result if you make selections of the five main areas in your image—as per my screen shot.

As I have no idea of your APh experience, if you're not sure how to create selections and save them as spare channels then use them with adjustment layers and live filters have a look at @dmstraker's YouTube tutorial here 

Cheers.