When we talk about great landscape photographers, Ansel Adams has to be the first name on the list. His starkly beautiful images of the American wilderness displayed flawless technique and a uniquely crafted vision. Most of his work made use of monochrome film; lens-mounted filters (usually yellow or red) to emphasize skies; and darkroom techniques that added contrast and controlled detail.
All of these great effects are simple to recreate. The first step is to convert our image to mono. Some methods for this are better than others. The best tools give you control over the brightness of individual color ranges in the image during the mono conversion. One such tool is the HSL panel in Camera Raw, within Photoshop. Just as Adams used filters, we can use HSL to control color brightness for a dramatic sky. Our technique differs slightly from the normal approach to Camera Raw mono, in that we’ll use HSL’s saturation sliders for greater control.
