Learning to Photograph Mountain Scenery - Continued Part 2

Hi Grahame,

Thank you so much for taking the time to try. Sorry for your frustration. Hopefully the exercise will stand you in good stead for the day you capture a hazy mountain scene, and I'm sure this is a great learning exercise for others.

90 mm ISO 100 I think what you are seeing as noise is haze.

Dreamy... Your sailboat image with beautiful blue sky and water. :)

Thank you for your efforts! Truly appreciated.

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Originally Posted by Stagecoach

Hi Cristina,

Not sure what 'dreamy' actually is with this image but I now know what 'frustration' is:)

I spent a couple of hours on this one trying to do something with it that was not 'over the top' as an exercise and it beat me. In the end I simply used Elements 'Smart Fix', some basic 'Levels' and sharpening and it was better than anything I achieved using blend modes, layers, gradients and masks. My PP skills for this type of image have a long way to go, assuming it can be improved?

A couple of observations I made;

a) I am normally able to easily use 50% noise removal in ACR on the RAW but for this image any noise removal immediately blurred it and I can only think this was due to the haze?

b) The image has a heavy vignette which I find surprising for the 18-20mm at 90mm?

http://i57.tinypic.com/344bo6v.jpg


Grahame

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Hi John,

Thank you kindly for your efforts, advice and detailed explanation. Very helpful and truly appreciated.

I like the softer version. Personally, I feel that we have all learned enough from this thread, and it's time to let this thread die. However, I suspect that one of the people that might fancy a go at this image, is you. If that is the case and you still wish to play with this image for learning purposes to share with others. Let me know and I will send you raw file.

Thank you John!

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Originally Posted by ajohnw

Out of curiosity I tried to put some of the mistiness back into the contrasty version - over done and no local area type lighting changes.

http://i61.tinypic.com/mvt1jd.jpg

Reduced colouration and contrast but a large part of the effect was simply dragging the white end of the curve down leaving a straight line. Not much either.

Then taking that I made a slight change to the gamma using the centre pointer in levels. Mid tone contrast changes after a fashion. Gamma redistributes the bits allocated for each EV in the shot. Curves does too but levels can be easier to use.

http://i62.tinypic.com/2ce12xh.jpg

What I am sort of saying when converting raw go for the best possible image 1st and add the look if wanted later. All sorts of things can be done to image if it's basically sound. Saturation, contrast and curves setting could easily enhance mist as the first shot shows and they all inter react after a fashion and if a too contrasty colourful image emerges from raw it can be changed later.

Colin threw in an interesting aspect of making further changes - leave room in the histogram for them if they are needed. Levels can make that aspect easier.

:) Having said this I have some misty shots that I can't cure - yet - so I am going to try selective sharpening as has been suggested not local contrast. Also in this case Christina's raw development may not have altered the outcome.

;) Some might notice a bit of banding in these 2 shots - it's really been through the mill so hardly surprising. Original --> high contrast --> soft again --> as I like it maybe. I feel a slightly soft sombre majestic looks suits it. :D Others probably wont see it like that.

John
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You should post a link to the NEF in a separate thread Christina on the basis of here is something to work on to see what can be done to it. I've done that in the past and learnt a lot about dealing with certain problems. Manfred did too recently. That one was very instructive as well and I found all of the effort I had put into learning more PP techniques had paid off and Colin threw in yet another that might be useful at times. My own post like this introduced me to dealing with things in parts even using simple straight line selections and also different aspects of noise removal software. I took a shot at a silly ISO level on purpose. I still use that shot to see what I think of a given software package. Another one was one that I had no idea what to do with it. Several useful ideas cropped up - the least useful one was well I would get rid of the "houses" for a start. Not possible or intended in this case.

I feel posts like this would be a lot more useful for many people than some other types. This thread is too.

Teaching myself is largely why I work on other peoples shots at times. I don't mind listing what I have done to them. I also don't mind trying to achieve looks that I don't really like. A lot of Colin's work falls into that category. I call it glossy but I still work at achieving the same results even though it's not my cup of tea. I could mention others but wont. There are other "looks" about. I work at achieving all of them. Some are tougher than others. ;) I need to think a lot more carefully about what I point the camera at now really but I don't hold with Mike's view that he posted earlier - hope it was Mike's - they looked dreamy but wont make a photo, I'd guess the wine was nice. The final aspect of that approach can be don't shoot anything unless conditions are ideal. Golden hour etc and also in my own opinion worrying too much about bookish compositional aspects - :) I had to laugh recently when there was a great debate about a shot that won a competition where there was money involved. Whoops near ranting again.

My latest escapade is to see how many ways I can photograph something that is going to be rather difficult for a number of reason so I just took one and went away to think about it and did some work on that shot anyway.

John
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Originally Posted by Christina S

90 mm ISO 100 I think what you are seeing as noise is haze.

Dreamy... Your sailboat image with beautiful blue sky and water. :)

Thank you for your efforts! Truly appreciated.

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Hi Christina,

An explanation of my 'noise' comment/observation;

The RAW file had no noise of any concern to me whatsoever as would be expected at base ISO. What I have found is that in doing a lot of my seascape skies although taken at base ISO some PP processes exaggerate noise in the sky and a way of reducing this has been to do a noise removal in ACR at the same time as other ACR adjustments before the work in the editing program (Elements in my case).

One of the many routes I used to try and 'enhance' your image added noise to the sky so I restarted it from scratch again to use my normal trick of removing noise in ACR and where I would have confidently used a figure of 50% on my images with skies and it having minimal affect on sharpness that I knew I could easily recover later immediately noticed what was basically blurring.

My observation was not of there being noise in the original RAW file but of the severe affect on sharpness that I would not see on an image that had no haze as this one using a procedure that normally works well for me. The other possibility for this happening may be that of different cameras?

Back to dreamy, the blue morning boat:) I re-edited that image the other day and basically did nothing other than remove the blurry heron and output sharpen. I went to take further shots of it the other morning and it was gone:mad:

Grahame

John

Thank you as always. It is nice to know that some of my threads may be helpful to others. I am going to pass on posting the raw image simply because I'm tuckered out by this thread, and even the thought of mountain scenes is tiring. I do envy your passion for post processing, and I've learned a lot from you. Thank you.

With respect to dreamy... I do think that dreamy images are far easier to capture in fog and mist. So stay tuned this Fall.

Grahame...

Thank you for sharing. In some of my other images photographed at higher iso's (bears) I had a hard time differentiating noise from haze, so this is helpful for me to know. Your dreamy image doesn't need a heron. However, I hope another heron will come along one day, and I hope he/she sits still for your next image. And thank you for your help with this image. I feel better knowing that you too experienced the same PP challenges as I.

Lastly...Thank you to everyone!

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Originally Posted by Christina S

I do think that dreamy images are far easier to capture in fog and mist.

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Take a pot, water and heating device. Let the steam rise in front of the camera as you capture the image. :D

I did not read all the comments, as I see this thread has gotten a bit lengthy already, but briefly I'll say that i liked #1 best. The pano shaped ones did not do as much for me. Perhaps I like expanse in scenery photos. It is natural to view scenery that way, to include near foreground and sky behind gives the expansive atmosphere.