If you’ve pushed a photo edit too far in post processing, you’ve probably noticed a halo effect happening at high contrast areas of your image. If you didn’t catch it right away, here’s the trick to removing them at any time.
Halos can form in your post-processed images for a variety of reasons including clarity adjustments, oversharpening, chromatic aberration removal, and sweeping changes to the luminosity in shadows, highlights, and overall exposure. While the best method for dealing with unsightly halos at high contrast areas after pushing an edit or using HDR software is to mask and blend the edited layer with the original image, sometimes you can get ahead of yourself. In this video, Unmesh Dinda for PiXimperfect shows one way to use selections and the clone brush to create a more realistic blend between sky and landscape. Be sure to follow along closely as a bad selection can cause results that look just as unrealistic, and possibly even worse than where you started.
If you haven’t watched it yet, Elia Locardi goes over his own method of removing halos from drastic photo edits plus many, many more useful tips while post-processing landscapes in his full tutorial series “Photographing the World.”
Better than heeling brush
Unmesh is a Genius. :D
Good trick, but I prefer the image with a little halo, in my opinion it gives more depth.