 Today, I'm going to show you how to create depth in your photos. Creating depth in a photograph is kind of a tricky thing. In the real world, we know that it's three-dimensional. I know that there's a light in front of me, a door behind me. I know there's things to the left and right of me. But the moment that you take a photograph, all these three-dimensional things become two-dimensional. And it's your job as the artist to let the viewer know and understand the three-dimensional world that you are in. The way that you're going to achieve this is through the techniques that you use to capture the photograph, as well as the techniques that you use to edit the photograph. When it comes to the camera side, there are things that we can do to help add depth to a photograph. We can use things like leading lines. Leading lines are a great example of taking you maybe from front to back in an image and helping to create depth. You can also put interesting things in your subject and your foreground matter, like these flowers that lead you through this field all the way to the mountains in the background. You can also use aperture or shallow depths of field so that our subject matter stands nice and strong and the background kind of falls nice and soft. This allows that flower to almost feel like you could reach out and touch it. You can also use layers in your photograph and those layers kind of take you through and back through the image creating some depth. But we can also use light and light is a really important component when it comes to creating depth in your photographs. Let's take this image for example. When I look at this photograph, I see three sections to it. I see a foreground at the bottom. I see a middle of the photograph and I see the mountains in the background or in the distance. But the way this is right now straight out of camera, the depth isn't really as strong as I would like it to be. And if I'm not careful, those mountains could feel as though they're coming forward versus going back off into the distance. So the techniques that I use on this photograph or the vision that I have is to create depth from foreground to background, keeping all three of these elements separate and unique in their own right. So the first thing you want to do in a situation like this is start to make selections of the different parts as they stand. Now I've already gone ahead and applied a graduated filter to the bottom of the photograph and since this is the closest element to the camera, I want this to be the sharpest most contrast part of the photograph. So we're going to go ahead and make just a few adjustments to this. Maybe apply some de-haze, maybe add some clarity, play with some contrast and add some sharpness. So right away we're trying to bring that foreground element to us. Now what we do in the middle part is going to be a really important aspect because from here we're going to start creating that depth effect. So if we go to the middle of this photograph, the selection that I've made, the adjustments that we apply could be similar, but they need to be less intense. So in a situation like this, I might still add a little bit of contrast, but I just don't want to add too much and I'm okay with there being a little bit of haze in that background. So maybe I might even soften that up by adding some haze versus removing the haze. You notice if I remove the haze and it gets almost as contrasty as the foreground, it's almost as if those two pieces start to come together when in fact what they should be doing is separating from one another. So I'm going to apply a little bit of haze to this, but keep the contrast and sharpness there. Also going to apply a little bit of depth to the shadows by pulling the shadows down a little bit and making that area just slightly a little bit darker. And then last and finally, I want to head on up to the background and then this is really where things get tricky because I want the details of the mountain, but I don't want to bring those mountains closer to the middle of the photograph. I want them to stay in the distance, keeping that depth going from foreground to background all the way through. So I am going to try and apply a little bit of haze to that background area, but you could see that the sharper that haze gets, the more pronounced and the closer to me they get. And I actually want them to stay in the background. So subtle amount works, maybe bring some highlights down, maybe even bring some blacks down just a little bit, maybe even warm these up just a tad. Now at this part, I could continue maybe dodging and burning specific places in the backs of the mountains. For example, I could go to my adjustment brush and choose a dodge or burn effect here. And maybe I could brush in on some of these darker kind of mountainous areas. And there you go, a quick before and after and you can see how with creating some separation within the adjustment, you start to get that depth there. Now we could continue working this, maybe I want to bring a little bit more attention into those clouds up there, a subtle amount by just pulling the exposure down, maybe adding a little clarity and some some color up in there, not too much. And then you end up with this quick before and after. The key is to think about the separation in the elements of your photograph. So when you have things in the foreground and things way off in the background, you want to make sure that you keep that separation going as you work the edit, whether that's using separate adjustments or whether you keep light things away from dark things, things like that. But this is sort of a perfect example of that. But depth in your photograph is really, really important. Keeping shadow details is really important. And keeping values separate from one another will all help keep this two dimensional photograph looking like a three dimensional space. Hopefully you enjoyed that tip and found it useful. I know that it could be a little bit of a complicated subject matter and maybe requires even further discussion. But I'd love to hear what you guys think about the video or the topic in general. Leave us some comments down below. Thumbs up are always welcome. And if you haven't already subscribed to our channel, please go ahead and do that. But before we move on from all of that, we have one important thing to do. And that's talk about our photo of the week, because today is Wednesday. Submission was sent in by Walk Photography. You can find them at Walk Photography. And I really, really love this image of this log on the shoreline, the way the light is the composition. I even like the presentation, how he has the photo kind of floating with his watermark. Really, really great use of editing techniques here. So go ahead and check it out at Walk Photography on Instagram. And if you want to participate in our photo of the week, be sure to follow us at PhotonerdsUnite and use the hashtag PNFL. We will be featuring more photos every Wednesday right here on the channel. Thank you so much for submitting, participating, enjoying. That's all I've got. Have a great day, everybody.