After an unusually heavy rain this lowland floods and then drains in a day or two. There is usually about a one day window to hope for a good sunrise after the storm clears and while the water level is good. And the sun only rises in the best position in December and January. This is from several years ago. The best conditions are with some mist on the water and this day I only got a good sunrise.
I went back to this one to experiment with the TK linear profile and a luminosity mask to try to bring out better detail in the underexposed trees. I got a good result compared to the previous LR/PS tonal processing.
Specific Feedback Requested
All comments welcome! Is the color believable? I didn’t push it specifically.
Technical Details
Is this a composite: No
Canon 5D3, Canon 70-200 f/2.8 at 70, ISO 100, f/8, 0.8 sec. TK linear profile in LR, tonal adjustments, only a slight Vibrance increase, no Saturation adjustments. Into PS for Topaz denoise and a TK Darks 2 tweaked with a curve then output to a curve to increase contrast in the darkest quarter tones.
“only got a good sunrise,” looks fantastic to me, Diane. The sunrise does look real to me, coming from Colorado where the sunrises/sets are just amazing. The detail in the trees also looks good. Love how the lone tree on the left is slightly bent - as if bowing to the others. Great idea to go back and reprocess with new techniques. Nicely done.
Definitely worth revisiting. Reminds me of a cypress landscape and makes me want to grab a kayak. I think you’ve left a nice amount of shadow near black. The yellow seems a tad blocked though…hm.
Thanks everyone! Yellows shouldn’t look blocked – they are well short of saturation. There are a lot of warm tones but here’s the histogram. (I’m sure Kris knows, but for anyone who doesn’t, you need to convert the image to your working space to see the histogram accurately.)
This is so beautiful! Question: what do you mean by converting the image to your working space to see the histogram accurately? Doesn’t LR automatically change an image to the working space that LR is using, when it imports the image?
@Mark_Muller, you may be thinking about a different thing. In LR Preferences > External Editing you can specify a color space for opening images in PS. But if you have PS set to a different working space you should get the same error as shown below.
I meant for someone here on NPN to pull an image and open it in PS, in that case if you don’t convert it to your working space the histogram will be displayed incorrectly – much more so than the colors will appear to be.
In order to know there is a working space mismatch, your PS Color Settings need to look like this:
@Mark_Muller, further clarification, as I tried to answer a little too quickly. LR doesn’t have any choices for its color space – it is a variant of ProPhoto, in order to best accommodate the widest color spaces cameras can capture. As you edit, color accuracy depends only on your monitor being accurately calibrated and your perception. But when you open in PS (or any other pixel-based editor) then working color spaces matter and you can specify the color space you want to maintain and the image will be converted.
If your PS working space does not match that one, however, then you should get the warning above.
Thanks @Diane_Miller. I’ll check my preferences to turn on the warnings.
The only color space settings I’ve worked with are those recommended by Sean Bagshaw, when installing the TK7 software. The idea was to match settings between PS and LR, which I did.
@Mark_Muller, what were his recommendations? If it was ProPhoto, it does match the LR gamut, but there are some gotchas. The best monitors can only display AdobeRGB and in ProPhoto it’s possible to push colors well beyond what you can see on your monitor or even beyond the human visual range. Some very high-end printers can print some colors beyond the AdobeRGB gamut.
Well, I mis-spoke…easy to do with a subject i know very little about!
I’m paraphrasing here…The idea is to optimize color settings in Photoshop, because Color Settings affect how PS creates the luminosity and saturation/vibrance masks. I matched the ProPhoto RGB for the RGB working space, with the Gray Gama 1.8 for the Gray Working Space.
Then you set up LR so that the output image from LR is assigned the color profile that matches the chosen RGB working space in PS. In this case, I made sure LR outputs the image as ProPhoto RGB.
The theory behind the recommendation is beyond me!
Love this image. The tree on the left is indeed interesting and adds much to the image. The colors do seem a bit exaggerated but I feel it’s often the right thing to do to make the point. I might desaturate the brightest area of the sky jus a tad to remove some of the yellow. I’m not sure.
I did tweak some color sliders to tone down the highlights, but there aren’t any yellows, just some peaches. Yellows are very common in posts of sunrise/sunset images but I’d bet they are not actually in those scenes. Color is NOT realistically represented in scenes like that by a digital capture. If anyone is seeing yellows, something is wrong somewhere. Shoot me a screenshot!
In the old days, maybe 20 years ago, there was a web post debating ProPhoto, and the title was something like “ProPhoto vs. Con Photo.” (No, there is not a Con Photo.) I used to tell people to look at it and if they didn’t understand it, don’t use ProPhoto.
I’m pretty sure the gray working space chosen will specify a curve that will determine the tonal separation you will see in the gray masks. Pretty sure… I’ve been immersed in this stuff for 20 years, but dragged into it reluctantly as needed, and have lost patience with keeping up with it or explaining it, even to myself.
Theory be hanged, there are some pretty simple rules to keep us all out of trouble. If we could only find them and then remember them and then keep them updated with software updates.
Diane,
The fog would be the icing on the cake, but the sunrise is spectacular to say the least with those warm and cool tones. I know you have to be happy with this lovely scene as this was well worth the wait IMO. I have no suggestions.
A great sunrise image. No need for fog here! The colors are amazing and stay within what is believable. I have to study the technical discussions above to try to understand and learn. Thanks a lot for taking your time to give these type of detailed technical advice, very much appreciated.
Great composition, I love the look of tree and blue sky in the left 1/3 of the image, but also how the comp is balanced by the strong color and luminosity in the sky in the right half of the image. and whatever you did to restore some detail in the trees worked really well, you achieve the Goldilock level of shadow detail, just right.
Color and saturation are personal and subjective as you know. My preference would be to dial it down slightly. Since you are now getting into TK Masks, the use of a TK saturation mask might be one way to do that in a targeted way. I used a TK 1 Saturation Mask, which targets only the most saturated colors, and then used that to reduce saturation via a Hue Saturation adjustment layer, dropping saturation -20. Because of the saturation mask, it creates a more subtle reduction in saturation.
