Hey hope you all doing well.
One of the few good things of a lockdown is the time you have to yourself. Today I used that time learning some new techniques (inspired and by Daniel Laan).
The mysticism behind some woodland images is just gorgeous but I always struggled when processing these kind of images.
This was a first try to some new techniques.
This is the final result:
I know it’s a heavily processed image, and may not fit everyone’s taste, and the base image was not the best also, but it was what on my library.
This is the base image:
Under exposed almost clipping the shadows.
Thanks in advance, keep safe,
Cheers
What technical feedback would you like if any?
I know there are some halos and artifacts, but it’s due to being new to this kind of PP. Would you do something different? Maybe not go so far on the PP?
What artistic feedback would you like if any?
The highligths coming from the ULC are a distraction or help lead the eye to the tree itself?
Pertinent technical details or techniques:
(If this is a composite, etc. please be honest with your techniques to help others learn)
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That tree has some wonderful character, I can see why you were attracted to it. I know this has some halo’s etc from the heavy processing, but to be honest I’m amazed at how much you were able to get out of that base image, end up with what you do have.
If you don’t mind could you please expand on what techniques you used, it might help us direct our comments on what we might suggest.
Obviously you are dealing with an extreme amount of dynamic range here. In a situation like this, to avoid noise when lifting shadows i would consider bracketing exposures and blending them with luminosity masks, or at the very least try double processing the one raw file and trying blending those with luminosity mask. Don’t get me wrong, you did a very creditable job with what you had to work with. But there are limits, and this is a situation that calls for bracket/blend to come away with the best image quality.
Thank you @Ed_McGuirk.
Generally I do bracket on situations like this, and I think I did bracket this one too. I was trying to pull the max out of a single file as the histogram Is not clipping neither highlights nor shadows.
This was made using a mix of raw manipulation, smart object proprities and luminosity masking, the most laborsome task was to paint the tree to add a bit more of light effect. Then it has split tonning (yellows to the high lights and blue to the shadows) a Orton effect layer (not the TK one) and a soft light gradient layer to add some artificial moddy/foggy light.
Indeed it’s heavy edition, and honestly I don’t intend to use PP like this a lot because I don’t think it fits my editing “philosophy” but to say if it does or not I’ll have to try on some images and knowing the tricks can be useful even if you don’t need them all the time.
Again Ed thank you,
Cheers
João,
Even the larger view, this doesn’t really come across as over processed. Although there is some evidence with the gray-ish upper branches seemingly washed of any detail. But in this case here I don’t think it deters from the overall impact of this.
In fact I think you could even increase the abstract nature by cropping up from the bottom to remove the reference of the base trunk - and just concentrate on expanse of upwardly reaching branches.
I also think the Orton effect works well here.
Pretty amazing you were able to extract anything from that original file! Kudos!
Lon
