This weeks tutorial will feature the beautiful work of my friend Nagesh Mahadev who took this amazing shot in Northern Norway. For those that haven’t seen his work, be sure to check out his incredible set of landscapes on his 500px and Facebook pages.

While our focus will be to punch up the reflection of the Aurora, we’ll also be making some sharpness and color adjustments along the way. The steps taken here can be completed using Photoshop CS5 and onward with most tools available in CS3 and beyond.

The above is a before and after of what we’ll be going through in the video. 

As we work through this image we’ll be looking at the following tools:

• Two approaches to creating reflections, one common one, and one better one
• Channels based selections
• Two types of selective high pass sharpening
• Creating horizon glows with linear dodge layers
• Selective color adjustment
• Crop and straightening tools
• Extending images

Thanks for watching and don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel for more updates!