Today I thought I would go through the evolution of
a photograph from what it looked like as captured to something that I was at
least happy to post to my Flickr Stream.
When we arrived in Jackson Hole, WY the weather was not exactly ideal. It was cloudy, chilly and there was a haze that was contributed to by the ongoing forest fires to the North in Montana. A grey cloud cover hung over the mountains but I went out to shoot anyway. In the end I’m glad I did.
Nikon D200, Nikkor 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5, ISO 100, 1/180 @ f/8
Here is the shot as downloaded to Lightroom. It seemed grey, muddy and the greenish/grey/brown foreground added little to the view as far as I was concerned. It certainly needed some exposure and contrast work but first I needed to crop it more to my liking. So the first thing I did was create a virtual copy in Lightroom.
In the develop module I used the crop tool to create a semi-panoramic. I think this crop improved the composition considerably. Now the mountain was emphasized and the grass field no longer intrudes. Still needs work though.
I played around with the Basic adjustments in the develop module until I came up with what you see above. Now I think the exposure is better, you can see some detail in the trees and the mountains and the sky are much more acceptable. What follows are the settings I ended up with.
Temp 5350
Exposure
+1.05
Recovery 21
Fill Light 13
Blacks 8
Brightness 27
Contrast 27
Vibrance +26
Ends up as a much better shot in my humble opinion.
Then I decided I wanted a black and white version. I created another virtual copy from the
cropped version and went to the grayscale adjustments and began playing around
with the sliders. I first clicked “auto”
and then just experimented. The image
above is the result. I went heavily
negative on blue and aqua and slightly negative on the reds (red, orange and
yellow.
The results are far from perfect but I’m generally
happy. I think both the final color
version and the black and white version are distinct improvements over the
original. Feel free to let me know what
you think.
© Tim Marks 2009
