For some this effect might appear to be a bit too over the top. But there are times when you may want to give your images that slight over the top effect. There are no rules that prevent you from exploring the untested and the un-treaded. Not at least in photography. A purple landscape image? Yeah, why not?

This is an image of a sunset I shot sometime back in the December of 2014.

I agree that the image is not quite what I had planned. I wanted a saturated image of a golden sunset with the mountains in the background. But I arrived at the location at least 15 minutes late. Light was deteriorating fast. And to make matters worse I goofed up the exposure. In an apparent attempt to appease the back LCD monitor I shot wildly to the right and in the process blew out the sky.

You might say that is not a major issue, I can always pull down the highlights and reveal details in the sky. You wouldn’t be wrong either in saying that. However, I prefer to do as little editing and retouching as possible. I’d prefer to spend more time shooting than retouching. All the more reason why I am writing this.

Ok, now back to the purple contrasty effect. Step 1 is again the mandatory adjustments of checking the Enable Profile Corrections and Remove Chromatic Aberrations boxes.

Next, I would pull down the Exposure slider to -1.20. I would also increase Contrast to +16, and the Whites to +20. I’d leave Blacks unchanged. I leave Shadows unchanged but pull Highlights all the way to negative 100.

Next up is Clarity. This depends upon your taste. I would hesitate to go too much either way. I leave it at -20. I fix Vibrance at -25 and Saturation at -40.

Next I move to HSL. I pull down all the sliders under Hue to -100, expect Purple which I extend all the way to +100 and Magenta which I leave at 0.

I move on to Saturation and here too I pull down all the Sliders to -100 with the exception of Purple and Magenta. I leave Purple at round about +13 and Magenta at +16.

Under Luminance Slider, I would skew the sliders depending on the final effect, trusting my eyes. The Purple and the Magenta sliders will be pushed all the way to the left.

The final tasks is to work on the Sharpening and then the Noise Reduction of the images. Both will depend on the image. I have tweaked them very little in this image. I also did give a bit of post-crop vignetting effect just to darken the corners of the frame and focus the viewer’s attention to the middle of the frame.

The effect would have been a lot more to my style if I could have achieved a purple effect to the whole sky. Which would obviously take a bit more work from here on. But, having found a brilliant preset things become a lot easier for me.

The preset I am referring to is the 11 BW which is part of D&S Premium BW Vol. II, a pack of 100 exciting monochrome presets from D&S. This preset does everything that I did, albeit in steps that are different to mine. But what it does further is to render the whole sky purple. Even better!

Here are comparative images. What I achieved using manual methods

1. what I was able to achieve the preset.

The preset definitely did a better job and with just a mouse-click. It saves a lot of time and energy and frustration when you are in a bit of hurry and need to submit images in a short turnaround time. There are more brilliant presets in the whole pack, check them out!