Description:
At Joshua Tree National Park there is an area called “Jumbo Rocks”. This area is filled with giant boulders and rock face walls with all kinds of shapes, lines, cracks, etc…
I found this in one such section of a rock wall. Its profile reminds me of a peaceful, sleeping giant.
Specific Feedback Requested:
I darkened the sky for contrast against the rock wall, but this was about as dark as I could go before introducing a halo around the rock. I think there is a technique in PS to help minimize halos. Anyone know how to do that?
Pertinent technical details or techniques:
Is this a composite? No
D500 with 200-500 f/5.6 lens, 1/500 second, f/8, 200mm, ISO 100
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That’s a very cool area and I really like the silvery rocks here against the dark sky. How did you darken the sky?
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Diane, I darkened the sky in the B&W Mix setting in Lightroom, by moving the Blue and Aqua sliders all the way to the left to darken those colors. Also in the Basic tab, I moved the Black slider to -11 and reduced overall exposure -.86, although these are global adjustments.
Wonderful, Mark. My first thought was the stones on Easter Island. Nicely seen and captured.
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I’m intrigued by your halos and ran back to JTNP (virtually!) and tried to replicate them, but I don’t get them. I did have to check CA correction, as there was a well-defined CA artifact on the edge of the rock. Here’s the one I tried and the slider positions to bring out the texture on the rocks. I hadn’t though to go B/W with this one but I like it!
If anyone knows about the halo reduction method, I’d like to know, as halos do crop up in processing more than I’d like.
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Mark, the tall pillar with the “face” at the top looks great and is a fine find (now repeat that three times quickly… 
) It’s also a fine looking pile of rocks, with lots of nice shapes. @Diane_Miller, In many instances, halos appear as an artifact from pushing the Clarity slider in Lightroom (if you look closely at high magnification, you’ll see that). They can be fixed, with a lot of work in PS. I would burn-in the bright halos with a small brush using what I call the L2 luminosity mask (the second mask, obtained by multiplying the original luminosity mask times itself…technically roughly the brightest 1/4 of the pixels). I’ll also say that it’s much easier to reduce clarity in LR… In Mark’s largest view, don’t see any halos, but I do see a tiny bit of jpeg artifacts in the dark sky at the rock edges (a basically ignorable artifact).
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Thanks for your PS luminosity mask tip, Mark. I’ll remember that.
I wonder if halos are more obvious and more prevalent when the subject is dark, against a bright background, and Clarity is pushed. The opposite of this light on dark background image.
I’ll practice fine find, fine find, fine find 
@Mark_Muller, just keep practicing finding fine stuff, and letting us enjoy it!
I’ve always had trouble with very diffuse (wide) darker halos from pulling the Highlights slider left for a bird against a blue sky. And now that I’ve discovered @Tony_Kuyper’s linear profiles, I find I need to use very little movement of that slider. Think I’ll spend some time today looking back at some previously troublesome images and trying that profile. Trouble is, so many of them were shot with the 1DX2, and there is not a linear profile for it. Tony, will more profiles be forthcoming?
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Hi Mark! Really cool rocks or boulders, it makes me want to climb and explore them!
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JT is the place for that. I watched a guy free climb the rock I showed above. He was mostly up before I saw him, then worked his way back down and sauntered off like it was just a morning jog.
