(Note: I wrote this piece a back in 2006. While much of this information is still likely to be useful, I would do a few things differently today. Rather than edit the article – and rebuild the photo! – I’ll just point out one important difference here at the outset.
Today, I rarely use the Photoshop “levels” adjustments. Instead I much prefer to use “curves” layers. Curves can do anything you can do with levels, and much more. While you can use curves and levels to adjust the black and white points in your photo, curves also allow you to control mid-tone contrast, to make important color balance changes using the gray and white “eyedropper” tools and much more.)
Someone just emailed and asked a question about how to get a photograph that recreates the feeling evoked by the original subject of the photograph. He was frustrated because the images coming from his camera are not doing that. There are probably a million ways to approach this, but I thought it would be fun to explain the basics of the process that I used to create a recent photo, Pacific Sunset, Windy Hill. (I’m not finished with this photo yet, so the interpretation may continue to change.)
Pacific Sunset, Windy Hill. San Francisco Bay Area, California. December 30, 2006. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell. (Sales)
This photograph was made along Skyline Road on the ridge above the San Francisco Peninsula. On December 30 it looked as if high thin clouds might produce an interesting sunset, so I headed for Skyline and drove about a half hour along the ridge looking for the right spot. I thought that Windy Hill might be the spot, but I continued driving since I knew I had another 20-25 minutes before the moment I was looking for, just immediately after the sun slipped below the horizon over the Pacific Ocean. Soon I gave up on finding anything better and headed back to Windy Hill, arriving just in time for the light I wanted to photograph.
I pulled off the road and quickly got out and put my camera on the tripod with the 24-105mm lens that was already attached. I framed and shot a couple pictures and then realized that 24mm was not wide enough; so I went back to the car and switched to the 17-40.
The elements of the scene were spectacular. The sky ranged from intense orange-yellow where the sun had just dropped below the horizon, through reds and pinks on the clouds, to yellow-greenish hues a bit higher in the sky, and finally to deep blues above the clouds. New grass (yes, that happens in winter in California) was intensely green, and some of the sky colors were reflecting on a patch of last years grass that had blown over.
The problem was that the dynamic range was absolutely huge – there was no way to capture it in a single exposure. (I don’t use ND grad filters.) So I had to bracket, starting with exposures for the extremely bright portion of the sky still lit intensely by the sun and, 7 stops later (!), opening up to capture detail in the shadows in the foreground. So, I ended up with 6 or 7 different exposures of each framing of the scene.
Back home I opened the RAW files in Adobe Bridge. As I looked them over it seemed like I could get sufficient details from the scene by combining three different exposures: one for the sky, one for the middle distance hazy hills, and one for the foreground grassy area. Here are the three original images (somewhat modified during the ACR conversion):
These three images were brought into Photoshop as “Smart Layers” (thus retaining their connections to the original editable RAW files) and then combined using masks. The initial masks were created using either the Magic Wand or Polygon Lasso tools and then fine tuned by painting on the masks. As I worked I returned to the RAW files a few times to do additional fine tuning of the conversions. The resulting composite image follows:
There were two large power transmission line towersin the distance just below the horizon on the right side of the scene – if you look closely you may be able to spot them. Yes, the next step was to use the Stamp tool to remove them from the photo. I don’t think that is worth adding another example here, so onward.
Next I made a basic Levels adjustment to the entire image. The bright end was already close to maxed out so I did not adjust this much at all. However, there was some room at the dark end to create slightly darker blacks. Here is the result:
There was not enough punch to the middle of the photo encompassing the reflected light on the foreground green grass and dried grass on the hill and the hazy canyons and ridges below the horizon. I made an elipse shaped selection in the middle of the image, feathered the edge, and created another Levels adjustment level. However, I positioned it above the two layers holding the foreground and middle portions of the image, but below the layer containing the sky. In this way I could alter the levels of the lower portions of the image without affecting the sky, which already was looking about the way I wanted it. Here is the result:
I wanted to see a bit more of the reflected light on the shallow U-shaped contour of the hillside, so I painted another selection along the green ridge in the left foreground and the lighter ridge on the right and made another levels adjustment. (I’m sill considering how much to emphasize this effect – I’m thinking the current version is a bit too bright here.) Result:
Next I fine tuned more or less the same area (but a bit larger) using a Curves adjustment:
I wanted to draw the eye toward the center of the image including the curve of the two hills meeting and the dark hills beyond. But I did not want to increase brightness or contrast here at this point since things were already beginning to go a bit too far in that direction. So instead of adjusting this area of the photograph I selected the area outside of this section and darkened it a bit using a Levels adjustment:
Since the grass reflected not only the brightness of the sky but also some of its brilliant colors, I created a saturation adjustment layer in which I greatly increased saturation. Then I created a mask for this layer set to “Hide All” – in other words, the mask eliminated the increase in satuation. Then I selectively painted on a few small areas of the mask to allow bits of the saturated colors to show though a bit in a very few selected areas. The effect is subtle, but you may be able to notice it a bit on the foreground ridge on the right:
As I worked on the earlier portions of this process, I had also been doing some dodging and burning. The final dodge/burn layer is added in this example:
Next was some sharpening, done in two stages. The first used “Smart Sharpen” to show fine details captured in the file that are not visible in the original RAW image. (Sharpening is a necessity when working with RAW files.) Here is a 100% crop (enlarged way beyond print size!) of a section of the unsharpened image followed by an example of the sharpening:
Next I applied Unsharp Mask to create “local contrast enhancement” that delineates larger areas of a given color/brightness a bit more:
At this point I felt that a slightly taller and narrower crop would be better than the original 3:2 ratio, so I cropped a bit off of both sides (more from the left) to provide the 4:3 ratio in the (current) final version:
Pacific Sunset, Windy Hill. San Francisco Bay Area, California. December 30, 2006. ©
