Late Afternoon at Lost Lake

[Patrick_Campbell]

Lost Lake near Mt. Hood in Oregon

Raw File

_DSC1405.NEF (51.5 MB)

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.

My Edit

[Tom_Nevesely]

Hi @Patrick_Campbell , I think you did a stellar job with your edit and I don’t think that my version is better in any way. Here is what I did though:

1. In Lightroom I did some basic edits like white balance, leveling, exposure adjustments, etc. I also made 2 versions of the file - one exposed for the sky and the snow on the mountain and the other for the shadows in the trees.
2. Next in Photoshop, I blended the two layers to get my base exposure down.
3. I then added a brightness contrast layer to brighten everything except for the very bright highlights - I used a luminosity mask to protect the highlights.
4. Next I used the “Make-it-glow” action from the TK8 panel to boost some of the colour in the image.
5. Then a Selective color layer to darken the blues a bit.
6. And finally a curves layer to brighten and add a tiny bit of contrast to the entire image except for the bright snow on the mountain top.

[Patrick_Campbell]

@Tom_Nevesely ,
Thanks so much for taking the time to work on my image. I like what you did! It never ceases to amaze me how many different ways you can edit images in LR/PS, and wind up with fairly similar results. My workflow was a bit different but I think we did end up close to the same end result.

I went back to my previous post and worked on it a little more. On my earlier version, you may have noticed that I cloned out some small branches at the RLC. I added a “Make-it-Glow” layer, and also used a little bit of distortion along the bottom to try and straighten out the trees (more apparent when you zoom in ).