This image was taken on a summer morning in the Dolomites (Italy). It is an HDR-Panorama that consists of 10 vertical shots, with two exposures each. Today I know that I don’t need to create an HDR for this shot. And with the crop I chose in the end, probably 6 shots would have been enough. What a waste of hard drive space!!!
I stitched the images in LR.
And now have fun with the editing, I’m really curious how you all will edit this image.
You may only download this file to demonstrate how you would process the image. The file is Copyright of the photographer, and you must delete the raw file when you are done. Please post a jpg of what you created, along with an explanation of what you did and why you did it.
Really beautiful scene here Jens! Thanks for posting this image for a processing challenge, I really enjoy these. Here is my version although i can’t really say the steps I took to get here. I just played around with it until I thought I would be happy with it if it was mine.
I did a lot of masking too, mainly to bring down the highlights in the sky, darken the top of the sky a bit, added a lot of whites to the foreground, painted in more whites in the grasses, and some clarity in the near foreground.
Thank you very much for taking the time to process my image. The Image Processing Challange is a really cool feature here on NPN, I love it.
And I really like all of your edits. Well done!
Camping is unfortunately forbidden up there. But we wanted to photograph the sunset, the Milky Way, and the sunrise up there, so we decided to stay up there all night.
As it turned out, we were the only idiots without a tent.
The main thing is that you had fun editing. I love the details/sharpness of the rocks.
That sounds interesting, David, thanks. I have to play around with that. My own processing is quite dark because I wanted to keep the pre-sunrise mood. But I also have problems printing this image. The details in the foreground are lost in the print. Maybe it’s time for a complete re-edit.
I finally had some time over the weekend to have a go at processing this image. I find the whole exercise of editing images that I didn’t shoot myself rather enjoyable and because I don’t have the associated memory of shooting the image, I feel freer to take the image in any direction that I feel suits it best. With that said, here is what I did:
I opened the image up in ACR and did some basic edits – white balance, exposure, contrast, shadows, and highlights. I also cropped the image in this step.
Next, I darkened down the sky a bit and lightened the dark cliffs a bit.
Then some of TK’s LIGHTS and DARKS Triple Play to add some micro contrast to the light and dark areas of the image.
Then a warm “photo filter” to increase the warmth.
Next, I brought the image into the NIK Vivaza plugin to give the image a bit of “structure”, warmth, and saturation.
And finally, I dodged some of the grassy slopes in the foreground.
Thanks Jens for allowing us to work this gorgeous image. I cropped my version similar to yours.
1- In LR I played with the calibration colors, opened up the shadows quite a bit and pulled down the highlights. I added a bit of magenta to the sky to compliment the greens. Here’s my workflow in PS Beta.
