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Haze is an integral part of landscape photography. Distant mountains are not as clear as close up objects. They lack contrast, are often lighter and may even appear blue or even purple (purple mountain majesty). It’s interesting that in the history of Western art, painters didn’t incorporate atmosphere into their paintings with landscapes until the Renaissance.
Continue reading “Photoshop Tutorial – Atmospheric Haze”
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In part one and two of this series I described how I selected the file to work on and explored the potential of the image in Lightroom. The treatment I ended up with would be exported into Photoshop and we go from there.
After trying several approaches particularly with regard to the color of the light I selected one that was very much like the unadjusted file. The only change was opening up the shadows in the valley floor a bit.
Now the fun begins. While Lightroom 2.x supports local adjustments I prefer to do the local adjustments in Photoshop. I just feel that I have more control in Photoshop.
The first thing to deal with is the silhouette of the pint tree in the lower left hand corner. I used the clone stamp tool to get rid of that. I have no qualms about removing things that distract from the image. But I draw the line at adding things. Someone asked me if I added the moon in Bristlecone Moonrise. No, I was there and that was the moon. What’s the point of faking it. The experience in the field would simply not be the same. It’s so exciting to take an image like this and think you’ve got it. But there’s always the nagging doubt in the back of your head wondering if you overlooked something and messed it up. You never know until you get back at your computer to see what you really have.
But back to Yosemite. So the pine tree silhouette had to go. Also, I checked the image for dust spots and only found one or two. The spot healing brush took care of them.
The next step was to do some local adjustments with Viveza. It’s a cool tool from Nik Software that allows you to select an area and control brightness, contrast, saturation and more. The clouds in the upper right needed contrast enhanced a little. Next a couple of Curves with layer masks helped open up the valley floor even more. I tried some vignetting on the bottom and really liked the way it funneled the eye into the center of the image where everything was happening. I didn’t think I’d need any vignetting for the top corners but tried it anyway and liked that too.
I made some global adjustments too. Selective Color helped warm the reds with some yellow, lighten the yellows and darken the blues. Color Balance also shifted the overall color just a couple points to the yellow.
Sorry I don’t have images of each of the steps along the way but that pretty much finished up the first evening. The image was starting to get interesting and it was time to sleep on it and come back another day to take a fresh look at it.
 Original Capture |
 After Photoshop Session 1 |
Here are the two side-by-side. It’s starting to take shape. There’s a little hint of warmth in the clouds and they stand out more from the background. The valley floor is better defined and the trees stand out a bit more. There’s actually a subtle feeling of warm light down there. El Cap and Bridle Vail Falls also are more prominent and their warmer tones contrast more with the overall picture’s coolness. You can click on the images to enlarge them.
Even before I fell asleep that night I was thinking of what needed to be done next. As you work on an image you become satiated to the colors, tonalities and contrast and you can’t tell if they are good or not. You also get emotionally involved. So it’s good to stop, get away from it and return another day. Sometimes when you return you are pleased and other times you say to yourself, “What was I thinking?” When I get the latter reaction it usually means starting over from the beginning. We’ll come back to this technique when you get far enough along to start making proofs.
So come back for #4 in this series to see if I said, “What was I thinking?” or if I picked up from where I left off.
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I have a good friend who is a very fine photographer who hates Photoshop. Not me. I love it and will spend days and weeks on a single image. But my friend hates Photoshop and wants to get done with it as quickly as possible.
So I showed him a simple two-step approach to Photoshop that gets you a long ways toward a great looking photograph. And I’d like to share it with you now.
Continue reading “The Photoshop Two-Step”
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Ever since I attended my first workshop two years ago I’ve been pondering personal style. At first I had no clue as to what my personal style was. But as time has gone by and I become more aware of the kind of work I produce, the idea of a personal style is starting to become clearer. So, I plan to write a number of posts on personal style and my journey of self discovery.
Continue reading “Musings on Personal Style #1”
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I worked on two photographs tonight that have been giving me trouble for the last week or so. Both were shot in Zion NP. The one I’ve been working the longest on was what I finished up on tonight. Hopefully I have it. We’ll know tomorrow morning.
My point in this post is I often get the feeling I’m wandering in the fog. You can’t see where you’re going very well and you just stumble around. You take a step, look around and decide where to go from there. It’s a slow process. I make a print. It takes several minutes for it to come off the printer. Then I look at it. Often times it’s very disappointing, especially tonight. Think about what’s wrong with it for a while, make the changes in PS and make another print. It’s disappointing so think some more, fiddle in PS some more and make another print. Hours go by.
Continue reading “Wandering in the Fog”
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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.
Continue reading “Photoshop Discoveries 2”
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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.
Continue reading “DxO Impressions 1”
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