Skip to main content

"Nutimik Lake"



The Whiteshell region in eastern Manitoba is spectacular in autumn when the hardwood forest starts to change color.

I stood at a narrows where a fast-flowing stream emptied into the lake. A long exposure (4 seconds) blurred the rushing water. But I wanted the water to look even more silky-smooth - in contrast to the fine detail of the forest - so I softened it (and the sky) by turning down the level of fine-contrast (using a tool in DxO PhotoLab). 

 While softening the appearance of water and sky, I wanted to retain the sharpness and detail of the forest. I made two copies of the image - one with the softening effect and one without - and layered the softened one on top of the other. I then erased the forest area from the top layer. I had to be especially careful when using the photoshop eraser tool at the border where the forest meets the sky so that the blending would be smooth and seamless. I turned the opacity setting of the eraser down to 25 percent to accomplish this.

 The light in the BEFORE image looked a little flat. I fixed this with tone curve adjustments. There was also a yellowish color cast that masked much of the interesting color variation in the forest. I addressed this with a color-balance adjustment in photoshop.

 I cropped the image a little and adjusted the horizon line to correct the slight upward tilt of the BEFORE image.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Bog"

There's a beautiful peat bog at the eastern edge of my home city of Ottawa that I visit often. On this day the bulrushes were swaying in a westerly wind and the scene was lit by the low-angled autumn sun. To capture the motion of the windswept bulrushes I set a shutter speed of 1/4 second. The trees in the background were relatively motionless but no matter how hard I tried I couldn't capture them in sharp focus with the slow shutter speed. This mattered because I wanted to contrast the blur of the bulrushes with the sharp stillness of the trees. Maybe the elevated boardwalk I stood on was vibrating slightly. Who knows? Point was, I needed an easy solution. I took a second exposure (not shown here) at a fast shutter speed to freeze the trees. In photoshop I combined the top part of the the fast-shutter image with the bottom part of the slow-shutter image. I had used a neutral density filter for the slow-shutter image, and removed the filter for the fast-shutter i
Post a Comment
Read more

"Boat Tour"

On a boat tour of Western Brook Pond in western Newfoundland two women focused on the spectacular scenery while I focused on them. The pastel colors of their windbreakers contrasted with each other and with the natural tones of the land, water and sky. The image tells a strong, simple story: two people awestruck by 600 meter (2000 foot) cliffs towering over a remote, pristine lake. This image required less work than many of the others featured in this blog. It's a good example of how even relatively modest adjustments can transform a photograph from merely "interesting" to "worthy of displaying". I wanted to separate the women from the landscape - make each part of the image stand out in its own right. I was taken by the colors and textures of the jackets so I increased vibrancy a little to bring out the color and used  fine-contrast and tone curve adjustments to  highlight the fabric's folds and shadows. I added drama to the background through t
Post a Comment
Read more

"Tulips"

Tulips on a white kitchen table with soft natural light from a north-facing window - excellent potential for a still-life photograph. As I did with the image in yesterday's post, I broke this image into two pieces, worked on them separately, and then blended the two pieces back together. As you can easily guess, the two pieces were "the tulips" and "everything else". The key was to make the tulips shine (literally!) and to separate them from the rest of the frame. I used exposure and tone curve adjustments brighten the tulips and add contrast. I used fine-contrast adjustments to bring out detail in the leaves and flowers.  I added a bit of vibrancy to the tulips to accentuate the contrast between the colorfulness of the flowers and the grayscale tones of everything else in the frame. The background was already slightly blurred in the BEFORE image, and I softened the focus further with fine-contrast adjustments. I also used a tone curve adjustment t
Post a Comment
Read more