Candace Lemarr wrote:
> I live here, and I still find it difficult to capture the Monument. Most
> days, it's just too hazy, or the sun completely washes out the colors.
One of the innumerable things it is useful to know when photographing
things is that the image capture system you use just doesn't "see"
things the same way the human vision system does. To end up with images
that look like what we see, correction is often necessary.
A scene that looks bright and colorful to the eye, will often look
washed out to the "eye" of the camera. The eye also compensates for all
sorts of color balance issues. And it sees lots of sharp detail in
places where the camera sees only subtle detail. It also compensates for
shadows. I'm embarrassed to think of how many times I've taken snaps of
people in the sun, only to find that the shadows on parts or all of
their faces that I hardly noticed are harsh and troublesome in the
captured image.
These issues aren't new with digital, nor are they new with color. The
great photographers of the B&W era found solutions partially in tools
and techniques for capturing the images, and also in the darkroom. It is
often the same today with digital images; they just don't capture what
we think we saw. And again, many of the solution are in the (digital)
darkroom.
I hope you don't mind, I've done little demos with three of your images
of the monument. The first two simply show different variations of the
results of applying brightness, LCE, levels and/or curves to the images
in separate sky and land portions. I hope you will find these closer to
what you are frustrated in trying to capture
<http://moosemystic.net/Gallery/Others/Candace/>.
The third is more extreme, but illustrates both a PS technique and the
effect of the color of light illuminating the subject. Here, the rock
has almost none of its normal red coloring. The EXIF info has been
stripped from your posted images, so it's hard to know just what was
going on. I suspect you may have had the camera set for sunny/daylight.
With either Custom or Auto WB, I would expect the colors, while subdued,
to still have their characteristic reddish tones. If this was shot as
RAW, you could, of course, correct color balance in conversion.
What I did first was to select the sky portion and copy it to a second
layer. Then I selected the non-sky portion of the first one and applied
a Color Match from it to the background layer of the grayish one. As you
can see, it transformed the apparent light to that of a sunny day. I
then also balanced the sky to look like a brighter, partly cloudy day.
Then I went ahead with adjustments like the first two.
What is especially interesting is that #3 now has the colors of #1, but
with much better tonality/contrast and color saturation. Where some of
the highlights of #1 are washed out looking from the direct sun
reflecting off them, there is no such effect in #3. That's one secret of
many landscape and outdoor portrait photographers, shoot without direct
sun where possible, to get more even and saturated colors. With film,
they would use color correction filtration in taking and/or in printing
the image. to correct for the overcast light.
Moose
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