Night's Edge

:rofl: I know that feeling all too well! I applaud your dedication to get out there, especially amidst the cholla at night, that’s just asking for trouble. :face_with_peeking_eye: I seem to get stuck no matter how careful I am.

It’s a beautiful image that feels very well balanced with the mountain and the MW working with each other.

Just a couple of things that I feel could be improved. If you ever want to print this, then the foreground is far too dark. It looks decent on screen, which is fine if you never intend to print. I tend to go pretty dark with my foregrounds too for a natural look, but this might be a touch too far. If you use my action to see where you will lose detail, the entire foreground essentially has no detail.

A simple levels adjustment on just the foreground and bringing up the whites does wonders to pull the detail out of the cholla and makes them glow.

Also, there is some significant light pollution on the horizon that can be fixed by using a color fill layer and masking it to the lower portion of the sky.

After all those adjustments the blues were getting too saturated, so I brought those down a touch.

Here’s the tiff file with all the adjustment layers so you can see exactly what I did:
20230227 Night’s Edge.tif (13.9 MB)

I think this maintains the ‘night feel’ while keeping detail.

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