Torridon Panorama

[Thornton]

Canon EOS 70D; Canon EF-S 17-85mm @22mm; F10; 1/500sec. ISO 400
4 hand-held raw shots developed in DPP then merged in Affinity Photo and modified in Viveza.

[DanK]

Nice image. I couldn't have done that hand-held, I think.

I would put some additional time into processing. The hills in the back are a bit drab from haze, and the front right is so bright that it overwhelms the image a bit, pulling the eye. I would increase local contrast and midtone contrast on the mountains and burn the bottom right some. Here is a very quick-and-dirty edit, not polished but perhaps enough to show the directions I am suggesting.

I didn't use selections for this. I created three layers, one for each adjustment, attached a black mask, and painted with a white brush.

[Shadowman]

Nice shot.

[Thornton]

Thanks for the replies. I’ll have another go at the over-bright foreground and try to liven up the mountains a bit. Ideally I’d like to alter the contrast between the nearer and further ones, to keep a sense of distance. One of the things I don’t like about some of the processing I’ve done in the past is that I haven’t managed to convery a sense of depth as well as I’d like because I’ve made stuff too “up front” with over bold colours and over-emphatic contrast even in more distant objects. I’ll re-post my revised effort here anon.

Julian

[DanK]

Looking forward to seeing the revision.

A comment about comments: I think you are more likely to get useful comments about processing if you describe what you did rather than (or in addition to) the packages you used. While most of the packages have bells and whistles, a large part of what they do is the same, or at least similar. For example, two of the changes I made (applying a curve and burning) can be done with virtually any editor. The third was local contrast using unsharp mask, which is not an option in all packages, but structure in the Nik programs and clarity in Lightroom come close.

[Thornton]

This is the revised version.It isn't exactly the same shots, but taken at the same time, so the exposures were essentially the same. I think I prefer this crop. I converted the raws to 16 bit TIFFS in Canon DPP because it has good lens correction for this Canon lens. Then I opened the TIFFs in Affinity Photo to do the panorama merge, plus a bit of vibrance enhancement and the addition of a little clarity. Then I opened the merged file in Viveza 2 (standalone, because Viveza is not yet working well in Affinity). I did some local saturation and contrast adjustments, and added structure in Viveza. Finally I did a bit of burning of the shadows and midtones in PSE.

[billtils]

Looking forward to seeing the revision.

A comment about comments: I think you are more likely to get useful comments about processing if you describe what you did rather than (or in addition to) the packages you used. While most of the packages have bells and whistles, a large part of what they do is the same, or at least similar. For example, two of the changes I made (applying a curve and burning) can be done with virtually any editor. The third was local contrast using unsharp mask, which is not an option in all packages, but structure in the Nik programs and clarity in Lightroom come close.

+1 to those comments from Dan.