Motivation: There are all sorts of new fangled Fill Flash tools
Features: We show you how to do the foreground fix in a different way.

The rule of exposure for evening and sunset shots is expose for the sky and let the other areas fall where they may. And that is the approach taken by Carmen at Flickr.com (see screenshot below). This is a superb exposure for the evening clouds. But the foreground falls to darker shades.

This tutorial will show some fixes that don't rely on the new fangled FlashFill tools. This party is a little wary of such tools because their effects spill out over the whole image. So here is a mixed approach that uses the traditional mask+Brightness/Contrast or Levels or Curves to correct the basic exposure problem. Then may be apply a flash fill but with masking to limit its effects to just the areas desired. The starting image is seendirectly below:

Again, simple photo editing tools that do not have masking capabilities will be of limited use. We need to mask the dark line of the foreground hills but with a feather of 20-40 pixels so that the foreground collections will be blended into the background. Since we are going to the edges/ borders of the image, users should be aware of the Photoshop masking problem. So we do this correction in Corel's PaintShop Pro.

The first step is to mask off all of the foreground. The dark hills in the foreground form a natural line. In PaintShop pro mask right below this line by about 5-10 pixels and the 20-40 pixel feather will then blend the corrections gently into the background.

The screenshot above shows the Curves tool being used to to brighten the foreground. The amount chosen truly is a matter of taste. Note the 40 pixel feathering puts the edge of the mask well above the foreground line. Note also there is a slight lightening of the colors at this line. One could correct for this by moving the initial mask line down by about 20-30 pixels, but then this leaves a slightly darker edge along the ridge. Choose your poison.

But there is no doubt that the field colors are brought up notably. So now we want to apply one of the new fangled fill flashes. The problem is that although these tools are generally smart about which pixels to change I like to mask off the area that the FillFlash is applied to just to make sure. That is what we have done in the screenshot below.

Notice in the dialog box we have redone the mask to only cover the green plant in the foreground. Even boosting the strength and saturation of the Flash fill fairly high, the amount of foreground green color we are able to bring out is a modest improvement. Now some may want to leave the plant dark - and that again is an artist/photofinishers discretion.

Finally we add two more touches to the image before we are done. First using the new Saturation Up/Down tool in PaintShop Pro X, we increase the saturation of the color of the leaves in the trees along the hill side. Second we crop the bottom of the image so that the plant directly echoes the shape of the hill just above. Again these are changes to taste. The result:

This is not necessarily better - it is different, and expresses a different mood or feeling. The before is like a Beethoven of mood and sweep, the after is like a Brahms or Bach of color chords. The important point is you can have either as you so desire with some simple photo finishing.