Whiten snow in Photoshop

So I have some snowy shots that are at least correctly exposed... I did know enough to bracket as I have been told the meter gets a little thrown by the white of the snow.

So nothing's blown out on the histogram, everything's there, but the snow still looks greyish to me, not white. Now this was an in and out cloudy day so maybe that's natural (I wasn't expecting a sunny day, dazzingly white snow) but I would still like to get the snow a brighter, whiter color.

Any advice on how to go about this would be greatly appreciated. I've fiddled with the white balance (these were shot RAW) but that isn't having the desired effect.

Thanks in advance,

-- Bass

The "whiteness" of the snow has mostly to do with exposure rather than WB. Your spotmeter/matrix metering system renders everything as 18% grey, so in order to make sure the snow is white, you have to compensate the exposure by at least 1 stop (+1.5 stops is not unusual)- make sure you don't clip the highlights though.
So, in your case, the best solution would probably be to either double process your raw file (with one file for the snow pushed one or 1.5 stops to whiten the snow), or simply dodge the snow...hope this helps.

Create a Selective Color Adjustment Layer.
Choose 'whites' in the dropdown box.
Move the Blacks (or Neutral) slider to taste.
Use the layer mask that's included with the adjustment layer to 'erase' any areas that you don't want affected.

If that doesn't work, then double processing the RAW file as noted above and combining them is a good idea.

Brings up a double processing question... when I've done this before I've just layered one layer on top of the other and erased what I didn't want from the top layer, but this seems a very time consuming technique and I haven't always been happy with the results.

Is there a more sophisticated way to combine light and dark versions of the same image?

-- Bass

I always use layers combined with masks and have been very satisfied to date.

Double processing with layers and masks can be very effective. Don't forget you can adjust the hardness and opacity of your brush to increase the control/subtlety of your brushing.

Here's a Q&D solution used by PJs the world over. When you don't have a lot of time to mess around: Open the Levels function, select the white eyedropper and click on the brightest white highlight you see. You're through.

If it turns out not to be the right spot to click on, Undo, then pick another.

I use this mostly on jpegs for transmission and publication, and no it's not absolutely perfect all the time. But it takes only seconds when seconds count.

Another good idea to a certain degree, but I would use that method on a Levels or Curves adjustment layer with a layer mask, because that's a global fix and you may not want or need the rest of the image converted as drastically.

You can use two copies of the same file (multi-processed RAW), layer them and then adjust the blend of the layers with the Layer Blending options. Double click on the top layer in the Layers palette to open the Layer Style dialogue. Use the sliders at the bottom to adjust what gets blended and what doesn't. Holding the ALT key while clicking on the slider will split it in half which allows a finer adjustment.

FWIW, and being a bit self serving, there's a brief tutorial on my website called Blended Exposures that outlines this method.

Care to post a link to that tutorial, Bob?
Merry Christmas, amigo.

Another option that will probably work well is to use a light,light luminosity mask on a contrast layer and then push the contrast up. This will help slide the whitest whites up while leaving the mid tones and shadows mostly unchanged. The luminosity mask technique creates a perfect mask using a grayscale version of the image as the mask.

Check out Tony Kuyper's site for a tutorial on luminosity masking.

to easily blend the highlight layer with the other this is what you can do:
put the layer with highlights on top, go to select -> color range, select highlights and adjust the fuzzines to taste, after you do this you will have a selection of the highlights, so all thats left to do is create a layer mask, photoshop will fill the mask with black, so you might need to invert the layer mask.

note: this can look a bit unnatural, to help this you can add a slight gausian blur to the layer mask .

Wim

Sure John, http://www.rf-photography.ca/Tutorials.htm. Click on Blended Exposures.

Merry Christmas to you as well!