Do your landscapes look dull? Give them rich, vibrant colors with a gradient!

Landscape shots can often turn out mildly disappointing. What we don’t tend to notice with the naked eye is that the sky is usually a lot brighter than the foreground, yet the camera really picks this up.

Normally, you might try to tone down bright skies using a selection and a Levels adjustment, for example, but you can also do it using a Gradient adjustment layer and Photoshop’s Overlay blend mode.

BEFORE: Note the subtle disparity between the sky and the foreground.

AFTER: Photoshop’s overlay blend mode can give you a warmer overall image.

So why do it this way? Because it’s easy to undo or modify the effect, because it produces a nice, smooth gradation in tones, and because it also enables you to adjust the colors in the photo in a very subtle way. This is useful in landscape photography, for example, when you want to add a warm, rich tone to your pictures. Photoshop has Photo Filters that are designed to do this, of course, but it’s actually quite difficult to get them to produce the same sort of effect.

The Overlay mode is one of Photoshop’s Contrast blend modes. What happens here is that the pixels in the "overlay" layer don’t cover up those in the layer below. Instead, they lighten or darken them (50% grey is neutral).

How does that help here? If you create a black-white gradient, with black at the top of the image and white at the bottom, the net effect of the Overlay mode is to darken the top of the picture (the sky) and lighten the bottom (the foreground).

But if you change the gradient colors so that you’re using a darker color at the top and a lighter color at the bottom, you still get the sky-darkening effect but you can also introduce a color tint at the same time. And Overlay mode is very good at applying tints subtly.

We’ll start our guide by using a "virtual" Gradient adjustment layer.

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Create and Customize Gradients

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  Create a Gradient Layer

  You can apply gradients directly to image layers, but it’s much better to use an adjustment layer because this leaves you free to go back and change things later. For now, just make sure the Style is set to Linear and the Angle is 90 degrees, and click OK.

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  Change the Blend Mode

  Next, select the Gradient adjustment layer and change its blend mode to Overlay. Straight away you’ll see that its effect changes. In Overlay mode, lighter parts on the adjustment layer will lighten the image on the layer below, while darker parts will darken it.

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  Open the Gradient Editor

  Now to choose the gradient. Double-click on the adjustment layer to show the Gradient Fill dialog, then click on the gradient button within it (not the drop-down arrow) to open the Gradient Editor. The gradient now has two adjusters; the top ones control the opacity.

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  Set the Opacity

  Sometimes it’s useful to have a gradient with variable opacity, but here it’s easier to set both opacity stops on the gradient to zero – just click on them and open the pop-up opacity slider below to make the adjustment. The next step is to adjust the gradient colors.

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  Gradient Color Stops

  This is done using the Color Stops below the gradient. At the moment, they’re both set to white here; it depends on the gradient you last used. The Color Stop on the left will control the color at the bottom of the image. To change it, click the Color Stop, then the Color button below.

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  Pick a Color

  This opens the Color Picker: use the vertical hue slider on the right to pick a color, then click within the bigger panel to set the brightness and saturation. Full white will give a neutral lightening effect, but a darker, redder color will give the picture a warmer tint.

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  Adjust the Sky

  This part of the gradient is white at the moment, so the sky is much too light. Select a much darker, red-colored tone in the Color Picker to darken the sky and give it a rich tint that blends well with the image foreground. You might need to experiment to get it right.

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  Gradient Position

  So far, the gradient extends right from the bottom to the top, but you can position it more precisely. Drag both Color Stops towards the middle. Just imagine the gradient in the Gradient Editor rotated through 90 degrees as it’s applied to the picture.

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  Quick Tip

  A custom gradient was used to enhance our photo, but you can also experiment with Photoshop’s preset gradients and blend modes for more dramatic colors and contrasts. The Violet-Orange preset is a bit strong here, but if you swap to Soft Light mode the effect is a lot subtler and very pleasing.

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