Last night I tried processing an image in Lab color space for the first time.  If you’re not familiar with Lab, it is the most accurate color space and has a gamut that covers the entire human visual spectrum.  There’s an interesting article written by Jeremy McCleary that describes how human vision works and compares it to the Lab color space which is as close of a match as you can come – Human Vision and Digital Imaging.

Basically, Lab separates luminance (think black and white) from color.  Similar to RGB, there are three channels.  However, with RGB the channels are Red, Green and Blue.  With Lab the channels are L for luminance (brightness and darkness), a for magenta green opposition and b for yellow blue opposition.

The advantage of Lab over RBG (or CMYK) is that the luminance can be adjusted without affecting color and vise versa.  In RGB changing luminance will affect color saturation; in Lab it doesn’t.

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Use of Spot Healing Brush

I have an image that is a shot of the Eastern Sierra at sunrise.  There are gorgeous clouds hanging over the peaks.  The early morning sun lit them on fire along with the mountains.  It was amazing!

My exposure was pretty close to being right on.  And yet, there was one part of the clouds that technically wasn’t clipped but was very close.  The RGB numbers were not 100% but were in the high 80% to low 90%.  The thing was there wasn’t much detail and it really stood out.

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In photography one of the most powerful means of growing is through interactions with the other photographers we meet, be they in workshops or in the field.  Not only do you learn from artists who create amazing photographs but you also build friendships.

One such chance meeting of an outstanding photographer and friend is Jack Graham.  We met on the banks of Mono Lake in October of 2006.  I was there by myself; he was leading a workshop.  We were shooting the South Tufa at sunrise under the harvest moon setting in the west above the imposing Sierra Nevada range.

I added the address to Jack’s blog in the blogroll.  You can also click here.

You’ll also want to be sure to check out his work.  You can click here.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was using DxO now.  I was introduced to the product in November at the Digital Summit workshop in Zion National Park.  It looked pretty interesting and besides I got a deal I couldn’t refuse.  I waited for the release of DxO Optics Pro 5 before jumping in.  There were a lot of improvements made to version 5 that corrected some of the more serious shortcomings of version 4.

First of all, DxO works with RAW images.  And given the sorts of corrections it applies, it makes sense to use DxO before any other RAW converter like LR, ACR or Capture One.  So that’s where it comes in my workflow.  Actually, I generally import RAW images into LR first, review and rank them in LR.  When I determine the images I want to work on I then bring them into DxO and work on them there before returning to LR.

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The First Surprises 

The recovery after the burn holds one surprise after another.  The first surprise was how quickly the thistles started growing back.  They didn’t even wait for rain.  It only took a few weeks and they were sprouting.

 The second surprise was how quickly the grasses came up with just a couple of inches of rain.  And they’ve been nurtured with additional rain and are growing rapidly and spreading.

With the grasses growing the color combination of the hills was rapidly becoming green and black, not a combination of colors that I found particularly appealing.  The colors looked harsh.  I longed for the more familiar greens and browns typical of Southern California hillsides in spring (at least when we’re not in the midst of a drought year).

Well, as they say, be careful of what you wish (or long) for.  You just might get it.

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There are more hillsides turning green besides the ones behind our house.  Further up Saddleback Mountain there is a growing patch of green.  But it’s not the natural green of tender shoots of new grass.  It’s artificial green.

 It has something to do with the crop dusters that have been flying over the canyons and ridges the past week.  These sturdy little planes have been circling above the mountains and then swooping down, much like the ariel tankers that were diving on the mountains two months ago.  But the material that comes out of this time is not water or the red fire retardant, it’s that same artificial green.

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Last night marked two months since the fire came through our ‘back yard.’  Since then we’ve had about four inches of rain.  In fact, there was more rain in one storm than all of last year.  As a result the scorched hills are starting to turn green.  We’ve seen crop duster planes flying over the foothills and mountains seeding the slopes to help control erosion.

Last night’s sunset was spectacular!

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I stumbled across a very effective technique tonight.  But first a little background.  The image I was working on was a 4 photo HDR shot.  I processed each of the four first in DXO, then LR and finally Photomatix.  The first pass resulted in a sky that was very strange.  The word that best describes it is ‘posterization.’  No other area of the image had this problem, just the sky.  Where it transitioned from a darker blue to a lighter hue the transition was splotchy and pixelated. 

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Boy, it worked out just fine, the Christmas cards I mean.  I got the card stock from Red River Paper and worked through the issues of my printer recognizing the odd paper size - 7X10.  And got the right ICC profile for the paper.  We ended up selecting their premium matte paper.  It is two-sided so I can print both the outside and inside.  Here’s how it turned out.

Well, as anticipated, I didn’t particularly like the print from last night.  I seem to be having a problem with creating images that are way too cool in the shadows.  So, how best to warm up the shadows?

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