This image started in a bit of a disaster.  If you’ve ever shot in Upper Antelope Canyon outside Page, AZ you know that you park your car, get into your guide’s truck and are carried about three miles up a dry wash to the canyon entrance.  It wasn’t until we arrived and were in the darkness of the canyon that I discovered the ball head on my tripod was frozen.  Our guide had dropped us off and returned to the parking lot so I was forced to deal with the situation and ‘work with what I have,’ (my motto).

Shooting hand held in Antelope Canyon is not the thing you really want to do.  And shooting hand held HDR is unthinkable.  But that was my only option.  So I cranked the ISO up to 1600, turned on the high ISO noise reduction feature in my camera, opened my lens up to f/2.8, set exposure bracketing at +/- 2 stops and calmed myself.  Many shots I found myself lying against the canyon walls to stabilize myself.  Some shots I laid flat on my back shooting up.  This is one of them.

The exposure range was so great I had to take five exposures.  Fortunately my camera allows for five bracketed exposures.  Back home in the digital darkroom I’d be using Photomatix Pro which has an auto alignment feature that’s going to be critical.

Once home I loved the photograph.  I loved the imagery and feeling it evoked.  So I worked on it for a couple of weeks and got it to the point where I made a 10X15 print.  It was unacceptable.  It was too fuzzy.  It’s really too good of a shot to give up on so tonight I started over with Photomatix Pro.

From the HDR file I created two tiffs.  First I used the tone enhancer and got a very nice image with open, interesting shadows.  Second I used compressor and got another nice but very different image with radiant highlights but dark shadows.  I wanted a little of both.  I wanted the radiant highlights of the compressor image but I also wanted the open shadows of the enhancer image.

Enhancer                               Compressor

So I opened them both in CS3.  There wasn’t a color space associated with either one and when I opened them in ProPhoto RGB, my preferred color space, the colors were horrible.  So I opened them in sRGB and converted them to ProPhoto RGB.  Next, I selected the compressor image, copied it and pasted it on the enhancer image.  It created a new layer to which I added a layer mask.  Then with the brush tool I painted out the dark shadows to let the open shadows of the background layer show through.  Now that looks really nice.  Flatten the image.

The next step is to touch up some flare on the high contrast edges.  Some very careful clone stamping with the tool set to anywhere between 15 and 30 pixels and a soft edge does the trick.  This fixes what ruined for me in the first place.  It’s going to be a soft image no matter what I do because it was shot hand held at f/2.8.  But the effect I want to create is one of softness so it should work.

Detailed clone stamping like this takes a lot of time and work so this is a good time to save the file.

Now, after all this I can run my CS3 First Action.  It’s something I run on every image.  It does the Photokit capture sharpening and then creates thee layer groups - Global, Local and Soft Proof.  This is where global adjustment, local adjustment and soft proof adjustment layers will go. 

But first, since I didn’t run this image through Lightroom where I could use the Clarify control I’ll try the USM trick - create a duplicate of the Background layer and run the unsharp mask filter on it with a very large radius.  The settings I liked this time were 20, 50, 0.  It adds some pop to the image without sacrificing the softness.

Ok, now it’s time to run the first action.  With that done it’s time to decide what to do next.  I don’t see a lot I really need to do with it.  I’ll burn the four corners just to draw more attention to the center.  Yep, that’s what it does all right.  It’s good.

I’d normally be looking at saturating the colors now but the sure don’t need them.  Each color has an exposure sweet spot as far as saturation is concerned and Photomatix tends to put the colors in these sweet spots when it does it’s HDR magic.  I have a wonderful contrast between the glowing oranges and yellows and the soft purples.

A little global adjustment of the yellows and oranges with selective color adds texture to the orange walls by darkening them a little and adding just a little cyan.  The fine texture in the walls is just a bit more apparent now.  And this removed some of the gamut errors.

There’s one more thing.  There are some very intense blues in the lower left hand corner of the image that don’t really belong.  I’ll use hue and saturation locally to get rid of that.  It ended up with -75 saturation and -75 lightness in the blue channel.  Inverting the layer mask to remove the effect from the entire image and then just painting in the offending highlights took care of the problem.  No more distraction.

Well, that’s it for this session.  It’s about ready to print a proof.  But at this point it’s a good idea to save it and let rest in my brain for a day and return to it tomorrow.  But this is an excellent start.

Just so you get and idea, here’s where it is so far.

Upper Antelope Canyon

Some might ask, “Is this the way it really was?  Are these colors real?  Is this photograph enhanced?,”  and the like.  And the answer obviously is, “No” to the first two and “Yes!” to the third.  But if anyone asked, “What did you have in mind when you took this photograph? What was your intent when you worked in it?” my answer would be…

“For me, this photograph takes hard, rough, solid sandstone and turns it into a soft, ethereal, radiant substance that billows in the wind.”  That’s what it says to me.  My question back to you is, “Do you like it?”  And whether you like it or don’t like it, in the end, your reaction is all that matters.