For the adventurous among visitors to this site you could book yourself a balloon flight this year at the Bristol Hot Air Balloon Fiesta held in August. This is what we did last year and found ourselves up among the birds at 6am in the basket of a Virgin Balloon armed with our Nikon Coolpix.

You can shoot some great pictures from up there and we shot the image below into the light over the city of Bristol, which has created something a little different. The image has potential, but there are problems that need to be put right and using the tools of Photoshop you can greatly improve the end result.

Start off by critically looking at the composition of your balloons (above) as some are likely to be badly placed and using your clone tool you can remove those that most offend your eye.

Start off by opening your layers palette with the shortcut key (F7) and create a new blank layer by clicking the centre icon at the bottom of the layers palette.

 

Select your clone tool and ensure that the use all Layers box is ticked.

This will allow you to clone onto the new blank layer leaving your base image untouched. The benefits of using the new blank layer is that if you make a mistake in your cloning it can easily be done again and remember you are not affecting your original image in any way as shown below.

Look for balloons that do not add anything to the composition like those we have shown below and using the clone tool carefully remove them. We took out a couple of balloons top left that were buried in the cloud and also a square balloon in the centre of the image that didn't seem to fit among all the round ones. We also removed a balloon that was tucked behind another.

Where balloons overlap you should protect the edge of one balloon with your selection tools. Feather the edge of that selection by 1-2 pixels and the cloned sky will be undetectable along the edge of the balloon as shown below

Look again at your composition and if you image needs a better centre of interest consider copying a balloon from one part of the picture to another. Using your magic wand tool select the balloon you wish to copy. Remember that holding the Shift key will allow you to add to the selection with the magic wand. Feather the edge of that selection by 1-2 pixels and using the short keys Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V copy and paste the balloon to a new layer. Photoshop will create this new layer for you automatically.

Your copied balloon can now be positioned or scaled using the edit - transform -scale command as we demonstrate below.

To add some more punch into your image select your levels command Ctrl+L and move the centre slider to get the result that appeals to you. Using your freehand selection tools you can also darken selected areas of your sky using the levels command, but make sure you feather the edge of that selection by 25+ pixels. This will ensure the darkening is undetectable. You may also wish to select the burn tool or your clone tool and either clone out or darken down some of the highlights on the ground as shown below.

Our image was coming along, but it was worth trying lift it still further by importing another sky. Look for a sky that has colour and add it to your layered composition. We chose the sky below.

After positioning the sky over your balloons choose Hard Light from within the layers palette shown below.

If you have chosen the right sky the effect on your image can be dramatic, but don't settle on one sky. If you have others try those to see the effect of those before making your final choice.

And here is the final result.

Experimentation is the key to good pictures and when you discover a good technique send it to your favourite magazine and if your image is good enough it could grace the pages of a national magazine.

Check out our tutorials on CD HERE