Over the years I’ve made countless trips to the Columbia River Gorge for sunrise. I’d guess I have, perhaps, a 5% success rate for nice sunrises. This morning looked promising so I headed out there and met a couple of friends there. As dawn came, the clouds started to clear and we thought we’d have another bust. But just at sunrise the sun kissed the bottoms of the clouds. For three minutes the clouds were on fire. Then, back to normal, boring sunrise. I felt pretty lucky to catch this.
Specific Feedback Requested
All comments/critiques appreciated.
Technical Details
Is this a composite: No
Fujifilm GFX 100, GF 100-200mmm @ 133mm, 1/4sec @ f/11, ISO 100.
Processed entirely in Capture One using local adjustments and their new Adjustment brushes.
That’s some crazy light! Wow is all one can say! Only observations are that the foreground building is quite dark, and I didn’t even see it until I enlarged the scene. If it’s an important element in your story, would probably dodge that a bit. The saturation of the yellows is strong and the sky is so strong in this scene that the lower half of the image gets a little lost without similar visual weight. I wonder about creating a little more balance from upper/lower by toning down the sky a bit and embellishing the colors below? Not sure if you would agree or if it would work. Regardless, what a sight to behold! You sure were fortunate that day!
There is a reason you keep going back, and this image is that reason. When it happens you get a great feeling of accomplishment , and is the return on investment for all those trips where the light did not cooperate.
The composition is iconic, for good reason. I like everything about you processing except for the LRC where the building is located. I would like to see a slight bit more shadow detail there in the cliff and trees, and I would gently dodge the building to isolate it. Don’t go too far or it won’t look consistent with the rest of the image, but I think you could get away with a bit more detail there.
That is an amazing view and what an awesome sunrise you were rewarded with this time. I agree with Ed about bringing the shadow up in the lower right corner but I don’t think it needs much. It has such a nice feel the way it is. It’s beautiful!
Something weird is happening with the latest release of Photoshop for Mac. I processed this shot entirely in Capture One then moved to Photoshop to convert to JPG for posting. I’ve noticed some weirdness lately, but finally investigated after this image came out so dark. For some reason, Photoshop is messing with the Gamma of my monitor and my images. In fact, I can see my desktop image go darker in the shadows when I open an image in Photoshop! Should not do that at all! And when I close Photoshop, the desktop image lightens up again. Too strange. Anyway, I did a conversion to JPG out of Capture One…no additional adjustments, and this is what I got:
The shadows look much better, not blocked up like the Photoshop version.
Seems like it’s time to switch to Affinity Photo and drop my Adobe subscription. I’ll have to find an alternative to Bridge, which is an excellent photo browser.
The re-posted version looks exactly like how I would have liked to see this.
Usually display issues occur when things get messed up with color space inconsistencies and/or lack of embedded color profiles in a jpeg, you can get strange, over-saturated colors. But I’ve never heard of Photoshop changing gamma and luminosity, that sounds very bizarre. Really strange…
What do you use for a monitor, and what are your profile and color space settings in your Photoshop preferences?
Also, make sure your computers video card drivers are up to date.
Hi Ed, I have the latest Intel iMac and use iProfile calibration. I have never had a problem with calibration. I watched photoshop actually change the colors on my desktop image when I opened and closed it. I have never seen this behavior before either. I thought it might be one of my plugins, but I uninstalled them and still had the same effect. I checked the preferences/settings and nothing has changed from years of using Photoshop. Hopefully they’ll get things straightened out.
