A Hawaiian Post Processing Challenge

Hey Darren,

Thanks for participating and offering your file. I find this to be a lot of fun. Here is my crack at your photograph. I am wondering if I over-saturated the sky, otherwise, I like the colors a lot.

Here is my version. I concentrated on reducing the blue haze. There are really a lot of renditions of this - this is a great way to see how others view the same shot.

Darren - thanks for submitting the file.

Dave

Man...I am aving a HECK of a time with the mountains below the clouds. Will give it another try later tonight. Man...you picked a tough one!!!

Roman

LOL. Roman, I think you and everyone else are having the same problem I've had with this shot. It is hard to get that mist out of the valley. It had rained for three days before this shot was taken, and even after the storm had passed there was still a lot of mist in the air all over the island. I've even tired to work with the mist to make it apart of the shot but I never get anything that looks pleasing.

Thanks to all those making an effort to "save" this shot.

-Darren

Ok...here is my try. The biggest problem area is the shadow area along the wall. Noise central as it is already under exposed...so it makes pulling detail pretty tough.

I left it darker so as not to add to the noise.

Still not happy with the edit....but best I can do with it for now (took 3 stabs at it)

having been on the top side of this scene, i have a fairly good recollection of the colors. i didn't get as much detail as roman did, & i think my noise level is about the same. the only area that i wasn't all that happy with was the water, but i think it is awfully close, so i didn't play with it any more. i approached the edit as tho it was an HDR, & feel mostly happy with the balance of the dynamic range - probably could have pulled it up just a bit more?

anyway, here it is for comments.

jp

What a beautiful place!



1. double conversion of RAW file - once for clouds/sky and once for everything else
2. combine to taste in PSCS2
3. flatten, crop and straighten, resize to 100 dpi and set desired pixel height and width
4. set black and white points with levels
5. adjust overall color using curves
6. increase saturation to taste (blue, green and yellow)
7. fine tune clouds using selective color (white)
8. dodge and burn selected areas to taste for best overall depth
9. reduce brush size and dodge ridge lines, rocks along shore etc.
10. selectively brush sharpen the areas dodged in step 9
11. stroke and frame
12. brighten a bit overall using exposure adjustment
13. convert to sRGB color space
14. save as jpg, quality level 11 for file size between 250 and 300 kb

* noise - I didn't apply noise reduction because in this case the cure turned out to be worse than the disease. I avoided contrast and sharpening adjustements in areas containing the most noise by using brush tools locally instead of making more global adjustments.

For those interested in comparing the post-processed versions above, here they are together in an album: http://www.fototime.com/inv/F44C06674B8D7FE

If I've left anyone out please let me know.

Wow, Buddy Thomason's looks really good, the color's are believable. Nice work. I am humbled,.I am having trouble with the basic step of combining the two raw exposures effectively, although I always shoot raw. I am missing some basic step somewhere.

Thanks Marty, I appreciate the feedback and the positive energy!
I assume you convert each RAW file to TIFF, or do two different versions of the same RAW file and convert them both...
So then you have two open TIFF files in your photo editing program window. In Photoshop I pick one image to be background and one to put on top of it. For the one that goes on top of the background I do this: select all, copy, then close without saving. Now the background image is the only open file. I select all and paste into. After that, for starters, I'll usually switch the new layer from normal to luminosity and reduce opacity to 50%. After that initial look at both images together I can get a sense of exactly how I might best combine them using all the other tools available. There are certainly other ways to do this and hopefully somebody will come along and share.

I hope you do not mind me playing. Here is my version:

I did manage to give it a halo on the oversharp. I have to watch that.

Since I don't want to hijack this thread, I will star a new challenge................