My processed photo is in the critique. I would like to see if anyone can extract further detail from the rock areas without blowing out the glow worms. Noise is a huge problem.
I used a combination of DXO 8 and photoshop elements. My file below also contains a small piece of a second photo added to the bottom. The second photo is not posted.
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.
Fascinating subject Rob! I’m not sure what it is, but very cool.
I ran it through Denoise in Lightroom and was able to get slightly more detail, but there’s just not much there. In the future I would consider doing an even longer exposure for the surrounding elements that you could blend in.
I realise now it is an abstract even though the green is from real live things. It is glow worms inside a cave in the Waitomo district of New Zealand. The problem with longer exposures is the brightest bit burns out with no real gain for the surrounding areas. In my critique post, I mention using an external very low intensity light source to supplement the worms, but not enough to turn them off.
I hope to visit some glow worm caves near to me (Aus) to see if the low level light works. Blending, as you suggest, might also be an answer.
It was so dark that I could not see the person standing within 6 inches of me or the majority of the glow worms.
Rob, This is a fascinating challenge (that’s timely for me because I was shooting sunrise against a very dark foreground several weeks back and wanted to get at least hints of structure in the foreground. Using your raw file in Lightroom, I was able to get what’s posted. To get here, I did lots of brightening using every element under the tone curve section plus some slider adjustments in the Tone section. Then I used Lightroom’s AI Denoise for this result. (Going back to my sunrise photos, what I learned on your file helped notably.)
I am pleased it helped. I used DXO8 and photoshop elements on mine. The piece I found distracting was that some rocks bathed in green have very little texture so I created two copies. One heavily noise reduced and one with only small noise reductions. Then, using layers, I masked areas of textured rocks onto areas of little texture. This file is very different for me too, hence why I posted the raw.
