Category: Photographer as Artist

DxO Impressions 1

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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Photoshop Discoveries 1

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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Zion Canyon Journal – Session 2

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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Zion Canyon Journal – Session 1

What I’d like to do is keep a journal of the steps I go through and the decisions I make when creating the Zion Canyon print.  It was shot on 11/24/2007 near the Great White Thrown turnout.  I was there the day before closer to sunset and realized this shot needed to be taken about an hour earlier.  So I came back at 4:15 the following day.  The shot required both stitching (vertical panorama shots) and HDR (three exposures bracketed at +/- 1 stop) for a total of six shots.

The image was shot down by the Virgin River although it’s not in the picture.  The foreground is a meadow in the shade with two cottonwood trees.  The middle ground is a Navajo sandstone cliff jutting in from the right, also in the shade.  The background is a tall cliff, also Navajo sandstone, that is still catching some sunlight.  The sky is cloudless and blue.

Here then are the steps I’m going through to take these six shots from RAW to a finished print.  It will probably not be completed today.  Sorry I can’t show the before and after of each step.  That would be interesting.

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