Category: National Trust

Adding colour effects to a landscape photo

Last week we went to the National Trust site at Shugborough. Although I took a few photos that were pleasant enough, I thought it would be interesting to play with the colours to see if they could be improved upon. Some of these worked better than others…

NT Shugborough: River Sow. This is the ‘normal’ photo
This one has, what I call, a whitewash effect that has toned down all the colours
This one gives a more vintage colour effect with a slight sepia effect to the greens
This is a mono colour using a nice sepia-like tone
Here the sepia toning has a lot more contrast
This is a more contrasty vintage colour effect
This is a bright copper-wash effect
And this is a darker, more contrasty, copper-wash effect

All-in-all, I found this a useful exercise. In building the colour effects myself I have learnt a lot about Photoshop and may have developed what could be an unusual method of achieving these effects – much better than copying what someone else has done.

I have kept the Photoshop file so I can use them as a basis for further experiments – these effects suit some images better than others. And, of course, much depends on the context the image is used in.