On my way home

In the past couple of days and weeks, I often made bracketed exposures of "difficult" scenes because I wanted to see if I could get pleasing results with Photomatix. While I wasn't really able to do that, I was very often able to get a natural looking result from a single raw file - and most often, this was the shot with -1 EV (out of five frames in total, from -2EV to +2EV).

I thought I might as well break the process down into the most important steps and publish them here.

The final image shown directly below is entitled "On my way home" - it was made, guess what, on my way home (or rather, back to the trailhead, but that wouldn't have been such a nice title) from the Three Sisters waterfalls in San Diego's back country which are, just like most waterfalls, flowing nicely since the creeks and rivers are carrying a lot of water after the spring rainfalls (and snow in higher regions) at the moment. (The single steps follow after the jump break.)


"On my way home" (NIKON D700, 1/160s @ ISO 200; f/8, 32 mm (in 35mm)

Below is the original image captured by the camera. The raw data has been interpreted with the "Camera Standard v3 beta" profile in Lightroom with a white balance of 5333/0:


Original (NIKON D700, 1/160s @ ISO 200; f/8, 32 mm (in 35mm)

The next step might not make much sense, but it includes usage of the "Recovery" slider in Lightroom to bring back the brightest part of the sky to a more natural version of what I actually saw - that's why I'm including it here. The difference may be subtle, but it's important for the next steps that "Recovery" was used.


Basic adjustments (NIKON D700, 1/160s @ ISO 200; f/8, 32 mm (in 35mm)

Next up is a "reverse gradient filter" to make the dark bottom part of the frame somewhat brighter. I don't like to use the "Fill Light" slider for scenes like these - at harsh transition between dark and bright areas, fill light often causes rather strange halos and artifacts that I want to avoid.


Applied reverse gradient filter (NIKON D700, 1/160s @ ISO 200; f/8, 32 mm (in 35mm)

Following up is fixing the sky with a local adjustment brush - just bringing it a bit further down so that there will be more of that "orange glow" of the sun that had just disappeared behind that hill:


Local correction in the sky (NIKON D700, 1/160s @ ISO 200; f/8, 32 mm (in 35mm)

And the last step is further increasing the shadows with another local adjustment for some more detail. I wanted to keep the bottom part rather dark and "low key" so that the trail would point to the bright orange sky as the most prominent feature.

Local correction of the bottom and final image (NIKON D700, 1/160s @ ISO 200; f/8, 32 mm (in 35mm)

Move your mouse over the final image to switch to the original in place.

I want to add that this is a rather quick edit. I think I spent more time on splitting it up into individual steps, exporting the single files to my blog and writing the accompanying text. ;)

There is some lack of detail in the darkest parts, and there is some noise as well that can be seen on a close 100% crop (1:1 view) inspection. But can you see it in the web version? You can't. And that's why I would just as well print this up to something like 20" x 30" (about 50cm x 75cm) without worrying about the quality at all.