39 degree morning at Bassi Falls south of Lake Tahoe. I had been photographing the falls and a smaller sunburst earlier but had moved on to other subjects. The sunburst suddenly exploded through the trees and I scrambled to reset my camera settings to get this photo. Had to raise the ISO up to 1250 with f14 trying to bring out detail in the water, catch the sunburst, and retain detail in the trees/shadows. My best effort at the time . Dynamic range & water motion a bit of a challenge. Wondering what advice you would have Sean, even if you do not select this for the webinar.
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I know you said it was 39 degrees, but with the sun star, it felt like a warmer feel, so I went with that.
First, I ran the raw file through DXO Photolab to get noise, sharpening, and lens corrections applied. Then moved it into Capture One. where I:
Warmed it up quite a bit
Reduced the exposure so the sky wasn’t blown
Increased the shadows to bring out the foreground
Created a gradient layer for the foreground to further adjust
Adjusted the aspect ratio and cropped accordingly
Brushed in some detail on the water.
Hi James, took a short pass at a chunk of this raw to illustrate some options. First it went through Lightroom’s enhance as it is a fuji raw file. Then I sent it to Topaz Photo AI to see what it might offer. I wound up just applying a bit of Topaz’s sharpening since LR already handled the raw, then kicked it back to LR, and then into Photoshop to get at it with some masks using TK8, to work on the contrast. The initial burn on the water was unmasked with a 50% grey soft light layer and brushed in. The following dodge/burn was done in two layers using TK8’s Paint Contrast with a lot of little brush strokes, about 20% opacity at base. A little color grading was done, and then I took a stab at removing a few flares using frequency separation (there’s a TK8 shortcut for that too). Fully correcting the flares on the entire image and retaining the sunstar would be a task as they’re leaking in a lot of very subtle/sneaky spots. OFC I’ve introduced a cyan cast into the water but further adjustments would take that out.
Thanks David,
Appreciate the efforts and feedback. The high dynamic range with water vs forest vs sun exposure in this area is always something of a challenge to get right in camera. I later thought of taking 2 exposures for a photo blend: one for the water and one for everything else.
Thanks Benjamin,
Very interesting and thought provoking for me with the edit process of you and also David. I will have to sit down later today really think through these edits vs my own and see if I can improve my processing plan… I have TK8 but I tend to lean on Lightroom more at this point. Probably because I am not as fluent in TK8 yet. Have not seen the video on frequency separation for sun flares, should be interesting and informative.
