

You can use a radial circle to enhance the sun itself and with a brush, you can bring back some light and details of some parts of your photo and hide some other parts of the photo. Use gradients to close your photo so the eyes of your viewer are drawn into your main subject. When done correctly, it makes a huge difference between an “okay” shot to a real, fine art photograph.

Use the local tools to guide the eyes of the viewer I advise you to not go over 40 on the Hue slider because it can create some weird colors, but otherwise, you can enhance some magenta or orange if you are developing a sunset shot. The goal is to try and get your photo to look as close to your memory of the scene as possible. Cameras continue to get better at capturing true-to-life colors and exposure, but they are still far from matching the human eye and many times, the photo just doesn’t quite have the visual impact that looking at a scene in person did.

Using hue sliders is key when you want to nail the color and really tailor your photo so that you recreate the colors that were there when you hit that shutter button. The same goes for saturation: you need to make sure that your viewer can fully experience the colors and be as captivated as you were when you took the photo. Now instead of boosting the Clarity slider, I tend to do some minus clarity on the overall photo, and maybe with a brush I will boost a little bit of clarity on some parts, but that’s it. I thought that doing so would make my photos spectacular but what ended up happening is that people noticed that I was “good at Photoshop” instead of focusing on the photo, which was my intention. I used to commit this mistake a lot and oversaturated my photos with lots of clarity.
