Landscape photography in mid-day sun

[Manfred M]

Manfred,

It's nice of you to take the time to describe the post-processing editing you did, especially for the people who are grappling with that aspect of photography. Though you perceive the details that you described as being minimal post-processing, I would be willing to bet that most people would consider that to be a rather large amount. I wouldn't think that way but so many people do so much less as evidenced by their descriptions and their results, which are less refined than yours.

I'll have to post the SOOC image when I get home. The changes in the image are actually fairly subtle.

[Manfred M]

Okay - SOOC (almost) image. I did convert it from AdobeRGB to sRGB, but did nothing else.

All of my other Blair Mill images are composites that use three brackets images shot +2 0 -2 stops apart.

[Mike Buckley]

It's really interesting that you believe the changes are subtle. I think they're quite a dramatic set of improvements.

[Manfred M]

Mike - anything I do that takes only 5 or 10 minutes is subtle to me. No really serious surgery (and in this case, I started off that way and trashed the result).

The rest of the images in the serires took a good 30 - 45 minutes each as I carefully blended and masked different parts of three different images to come up with the final image.

The largest effort was cloning out the branch hanging over the tower. Except for a mask on the tower and some saturation adjustment, everything else was what I do to just about any RAW image to flush out the content in the data. My camera has around 14+ stops of dynamic range, yet my display is limited to perhaps 5 or 6 stops. That's an awful lot of material that I have to work with.

I'm one of those photographers who feels that half of the work occurs in the camera, and the other half in the digital darkroom.