Hey all,
I decided to go a little more heavy handed with the editing for this one to really bring out the detail and intensity of this mountain range. I wanted to know your opinions though, if I went too far, or if this could be taken a step further even. I'll share the original unedited .jpg as well for reference.
Let me know what you think! This is in California's beautiful Sierra Nevada mountains.
Give me a day or so and let me see what I would do with it and I will get back to you
No rush! I appreciate the time taken
I am going to do 2 versions. One I am going to edit how I normally would, then the second I am going to go crazy and do a sky replacement. Stay tuned!
This is what I ended up doing, I liked how the mountain was more in shadow, but I didnt' end up doing the sky replaement, it didn't look good
I may be a bit conventional in my approach here, Liam, but I think you have a problem from the start in shooting into the sun so much that the entire image is marked by flare, and ghost images of the diaphragm at top left & bottom right, which can be used creatively but don't enhance this image. The flare is evident in the overall milkiness, which you've reduced in your edit. As you've used a short telephoto focal length with a fairly narrow field of view, it may have been possible to shade the front element from direct sunlight, which can help a lot. To a large extent, your editing achieves something like you would have got without the flare.
Shooting "contre jour" into the light can have appealing visual results, but it's a fine balance against these problems. The net result here is that you're at a disadvantage from the start, battling problems rather than having more freedom of interpretation. Shooting RAW would help - is there any reason not to? - particularly to avoid banding artifacts in the sky if you process heavily. I've had a go at an edit, and end up close to where you did, but it felt like a rescue job, with little choice ultimately about where to go.
Like a negative, the initial digital capture sets the limits of what you can achieve. However, if you like this more hazy, impressionistic look, that's a valid creative choice. I'm putting a somewhat conventional photographer's view to you. It's not "right", but a common view, which I share.
This was shot in raw actually, I just have my camera set up to also take a .jpg image which can be easier to share with friends. You're definitely right about shooting into the sun, I know its not ideal and I usually try to avoid it. I just loved this valley so much that I thought I could try anyways and see if I could go about fixing that 'milkiness' you described while editing.
I tried to reduce the flare like you said by mainly increasing contrast while also reducing color. In addition I lowered exposure but bumped up the shadows so the mountains weren't too dark on the right. A couple graduated filters as well for some more refinement, but I'm still unsure how I feel, looking at it the following morning (I edited this last night).
I really should get a lens hood for this telephoto lens, as others have pointed out! I didn't realize how much of an impact it could make, but I will definitely try that next time.
I'd definitely get and use a lens hood, Liam.
However, if you're shooting into the sun, there will come a point where the sun shines on the front element, causing massive flare and the ghosts. In this situation, careful shading with your hand or a hat or something to JUST shadow the front element will help. It's easier if you're using a remote release, so you can look at the front of your rig. It's still easy to end up with a photo of your hand. If the sun is in the frame, a hood does nothing.
Very few dedicated lens hoods are ideal in design, believe it or not. Some of the "petal" ones are. Unfortunately, if you use a zoom, then the hood cannot vignette the lens at its widest setting, making it very limited in effectiveness at the long end.
The lens flares (4) should be removed and the contrail doesn't add to the image since it appears that it is not the point of interest. Once both of those have been fixed you have a lot of dead space with the empty blue sky.
Because I am not there it is difficult to know where the sun rises and sets. Perhaps a different time of day when the light is not so harsh and a bit warmer? Sunrise or sunset.
Good point about the time of day. Honestly I don't think I'm experienced enough at editing to remove the sun flares or jet trails. But this was a very impromptu shot, just taken out the car window while driving (not me of course) so I was seeing if it was redeemable with some editing.
The first thing I noticed was flare and subdued color. So right off, there are some problems that should be fixed in camera prior to digital editing. The use of a lens hood AND some other tool (I often use a hat.) to shade the lens so that there is no direct sun on the lens. Using a tripod and a timer or shutter release cable can help with this, and improve overall sharpness as well.
Again, before you begin editing, I hope that you shot in RAW mode. You can adjust saturation, contrast, dynamic range, and to some extent compensate for the shortcomings it the photograph as you shot it.
The next thing was the condensation trail. You are taking a nature photo, and the con trail doesn't fit, is a distraction, and detracts from the composition. This is very easily edited out, and in my opinion, should be.
Whatever technique you used to enhance the details doesn't look realistic to me, which is often OK, but in this particular context seems overdone.
The strong overall blue tint makes the photo less pleasing to my eye. The strong flare artifact on the lower right is quite distracting, and could be mitigated by some adjustments. Besides the beautiful landscape itself, I particularly like the wisps of clouds on the upper right, and would like to see the shot in weather that does more of that.
I understand the practical necessities of the composition. You want to get the V of the valley on the left, the heights of the mountains on the right,. However, I would like to see more of the valley floor on the bottom of the valley. Based on the aspect ratio of the crop, I think that you either had a lot of sky that you didn't need or want (because of the sun in the upper left, particularly, or alternatively you cropped out much of the valley that I would want. Including more of the valley would help to establish the immense scale of the
Yeah, the lower photo is the original unedited shot, that I just wanted to share for reference. I wasn't a fan of that blue tint either so I mostly tried to decolorize it.
You're right about the camera operations as well. If I was planning this shot I would have done what you said, but this was a very impromptu shot just taken out the car window while driving down the highway.
In terms of composition, I see that now where I left a lot of empty space in the sky. My goal with the 2:1 crop on the edited image was to remove some of that space, but on the original image that's as far down as it went, so I didn't crop any of the valley. I agree with you though, more of the valley would have been a stronger composition than what I captured here.
In terms of the jet trail, how would you go about editing that out? I'm pretty inexperienced and only really use the Camera Raw Editor (and yes I shoot in raw), but I don't know how to edit out things like that jet trail. Any advice on that would be appreciated as well!
The contrail is fairly easily removed by cloning over it with adjacent sky, if you have that facility, Liam.
FWIW, here's the edit I alluded to above, with contrail removed just now. I've also brushed on blur in the area as all the prior processing left grotty artifacts in the sky around there.
Liam did you try monochrome?
I did, but wasn't a fan of the look. It turned out too warm in my opinion. The coolness of the shot is not very pronounced as I lowered the saturation a lot, but switching to pure b&w seemed to remove much of the depth.