What is described above should get you roughly what the final image will look like.

Finer adjustments can be made using a paintbrush with the foreground colour as Black 0, and background colour as White 255. If you paint in Black 0 it will remove the mask, paint in White 255 it will put it back again.

Clicking on the 'Mask Icon' in the layers palette will make the adjustment layer show up as Red. It is easy then to paint over with your paintbrush any parts where you don't want the filter to be applied. In the above example I painted over parts of the stoney beach and the poles sticking up into the sky.

Choose a large brush for painting over the beach with opacity set at 100, Hardness set at 50. For finer points like the poles reduce the size of the brush. Reduce the size and opacity if you are going along the horizon or over very detailed objects so you can go over it slowly and get the effect right.

If you do make a mistake you can always paint it back in again by right clicking to choose the 'Background' colour White 255 and use that.

To see the results click the 'Mask' icon in the 'Layers Palette' to turn off the red mask.

If you are happy with the results - go to 'Layers - Merge - Flatten'.

(The final layer can be adjusted for opacity before you merge and flatten to give an ND2 or ND4 style of filter.)

This is how I do it, if anyone has any improvements or tips to add, I would be very pleased to hear them :)

Richard

Message edited on: 04/24/2005 08:10

And every one said, 'If we only live,
We too will go to sea in a Sieve,---
To the hills of the Chankly Bore!'
Far and few, far and few, Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue, And they went to sea in a Sieve.

Edward Lear
http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/ns/jumblies.html