On my recent trip to Arizona, I was fortunate to be able to get up to the Grand Canyon the day after a snowstorm passed through. The conditions made for some dramatic light towards sunset.
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, explain what you did, and why you did it.
Hi Patrick, I really liked the diagonals in this picture. How they interact and lead you into the light. I went with a panoramic crop to try to get more attention in the center of the image. Thanks for sharing!
Hi Patrick,
This is a really beautiful scene! Thanks for posting your raw file for us to play with. Here is my quick edit and steps. I did all the work in photoshop using the raw filter and then either brushing in the adjustment or used a luminosity mask.
First I cooled the image by 3 points or something, not much and i excluded the beautiful golden light in the canyon. I brought up the white point 40 something points for most of the image and used a little less in the big bright spot in the center left. I added a few point of warmth to the highlights using a luminosity mask and finally I added a little more contrast to the light in the canyon. I cropped the right side a little and also used the remove tool to lose the open space in the sky.
Thank you for posting this photo and allowing us to process it. I have never been to the Grand Canyon yet, but I am hoping to visit there later this spring. So getting to process an image from there was exciting.
I went completely the other way from what you did and what the others did. I felt like the image played with opposites, light vs dark, soft vs rough, grounded vs ethereal. So I processed it to try and accentuate those opposites.
So, what did I do. I warmed the color balance up to 7500 in ACR. Opened the blacks and shadows. Brought down the highlights and the whites a bit. I also increased the overall softness by reducing Clarity and Dehaze a bit. I also went into the Calibration tool and increased the saturation on the blue channel and red channel. Then I opened the file in PS as a smart object. In PS, I added two burn layers and burned down the URC clouds through a luminosity mask to create some depth and to produce a visual block to keep the eye on the soft warm light. I then burned, again through a darks mask, down the upper triangle area of the FG cliff to get it close to the brightness of the LLC. I duplicated those three layers and merged them into another smart object. I then opened the ACR filter and reduced the Clarity and Dehaze to bring in more softness into the FG cliffs, which I then applied through a FG mask, leaving the sky untouched. Finally flattening, sharpening for web, converting to sRGB color space, and saving as a JPG.
Youssef, thanks for taking the time to work on this image! Another interpretation worthy of hanging on the wall! Here’s hoping you get some nice light when you visit there in April!
This is a lovely image and I really enjoyed playing with it.
I wanted to focus on the background mountains a bit and try and pull them into the image a bit. I’ve attempted to lead the eye into them a bit and I’ve obviously cropped it down a bit.
Other than that I’ve tried to dehaze the central area a tiny bit. I’ve taken a bit of saturation out of the sky and overall I’ve added a little bit of blue in the shadows and a little bit of yellow in the highlights.
Very minor tweaks really, I guess the crop is the biggest change. I hope you like it, or at least don’t hate it!
@DomMcKenzie, thanks for taking the time to work on my image. To my eye, the sky looks too washed out and the crop on the bottom eliminates the line pointing to the butte in the left bottom 1/3.
