4
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Collin Riley's picture

Canyonlands Sunset

As the sun set over Canyonlands, the clouds were lit up by it's last rays just as the moon rose behind them.

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3 Comments

Great scene, but I think the compositon could use some work. The post processing is also a little bit strong for my taste. Especially the foreground-sky trtansition could be cleaner in my opinion. Great colors though.

Just looked at this on a different monitor than the one I edited on and yikes you're definitely right on the processing! I really like how you edit your pictures, do you have any tips on keeping yourself in check?

Thanks for checking out my portfolio! I think it comes down to precision. When I’m blending multiple exposures together in photoshop, I work a lot with apply image to get an accurate mask. I never just throw a gradient on. If you use precise masks, you’ll obviously get cleaner results, and you won’t go too far because the transition between exposures isn’t as soft. That way you see if, say the sky is too dark in relation to the foreground, because there’s no gradient to hide it. Also, you might want to take a break before you save the final image. Just don’t look at the screen for five minutes and let your eyes adjust to normal. If you come back and the edit is too strong, I often just put a copy of the original shot (medium exposure) on top of everything at 10-25% opacity.
I don’t know if that was helpful at all, it probably depends on your editing style too.