This is the final image - after I applied my own Instagram-type filter. To do this - I started by opening the photo in Camera RAW and cropping the image to be a square (though I know Instagram allows landscape rectangles these days). Then, I did some basic adjustments to make the original photo look like a filter had been applied. I reviewed the tutorials online and wasn’t sure which one would work best to give that arid landscape feel that I wanted (the original image seemed to have a lot of greens and blues, which I wanted to ditch). I played around with the basic adjustments and landed on the following to give it an arid red rocks landscape look.
- Temperature: pulled the slider to the right to warm it up to 9900
- Tint: moved the slider to the right, towards the pink tint side (to a value of +42)
- Exposure: Increased to +0.15
- Contrast: Bumped up to +40
- Decreased Highlights (-68) and Increased Shadows (+12)
- Increased the White levels (+15) and Decreased the Black levels (-44)
- Increased Clarity (+33)
- Left Vibrance and Saturation settings at 0
Then, I brought the image into Photoshop to add a few more things:
- I liked how many of the filters offered a tint, so I decided to create a new fill layer (Layer > New Fill Layer à Solid Color); For the color, I hand picked a beigey/apricot color (Hexadecimal #fbdea6) that seemed to match the red rocks, but didn’t change that tint too much. And for the blend mode, I selected Multiply. This added a nice tint, but wasn’t too overpowering.
I added a Black border by creating a Rectangle with Black Fill, then I made a smaller Rectangle selection inside there (smaller by the distance that I wanted the border)…then I went to Select > Inverse (to select the inverse, just the small border) - then I clicked the Layer Mask button to create a mask - that allowed the squirrel image to shine through.
I decided to not add a vignette/shadow effect to this image/my filter. Hope you like the end result!