Golden Hour

For this photo, we had to take the picture during “golden hour”. This is a time right before sunset and just before sunrise where photos will have very nice lighting. During this time, I went to my backyard and took photos of all sorts of things to try and make the most of this effect. While taking photos, I changed the white balance setting to one that would make the photos look warmer, to really push the idea of “golden”. I decided that this photo was the best but, because I took it in a spot with a lot of sunlight, the shadows were very harsh. I used Photoshop and a few different methods to fix this. First, I used the screen blend mode with a mask to brighten the darkest areas. This wasn’t super efficient, since I had to be really exact with the brush in order to make it look natural. I used two screen layers in total. Then, I tried out a contrast adjustment layer to decrease the difference between the super bright and super dark areas. This really helped to reduce the shadows. Finally, I raised the saturation just a tiny bit and applied a slight warming filter to make the colors look how I wanted.