Getting the mountain to come out!
Author: weshoot
I work and live in the great Pacific Northwest. The area from Seattle through Tacoma and Olympia, Washington to Portland, Oregon is generally where you will find me. The features that stand out around here are views with a mountain in them. Whether it is Mt. Rainier, Mt. Saint Helens, Mt. Adams, Mt. Baker, or another of those monoliths that dominate the scenery, sometimes they are far enough away to get aerial haze clouding the images. Consequently, if the image is light enough for great detail in the foreground of the image, the mountain will appear so light as to almost disappear from the image. Here are some ways to fix this: all involve the use of editing software of some kind, but the results can be worth it. See the two samples below.
There are many ways to get this to come out in one image. If you are using raw software, you can make two different tiff images from the same raw file. Manipulate one tiff so that the foreground comes out with the proper density and color, and edit the other version to be much darker, with more contrast and saturation. Name them differently so you can bring them both up in your editing software. Copy the lighter image to the darker one as a layer. You can use the following editing program operations to edit the image.
I prefer the following method over the one outlined above, mainly because it allows retouching of the image as one image, rather than dealing with layering two different unretouched images. First, open your image in your editing program – the one I currently use is Adobe Photoshop CS4. Next, retouch and enhance the image as necessary. Next, make a duplicate layer. Save the newly-layered file as a separate psd file. Click the eyeball symbol next to the upper layer to make it invisible, and move to the lower layer to work on it. There are several ways to darken the bottom layer. I prefer using adjustment layers like curves, levels, saturation, etc., to get this done. Once the mountain looks sufficiently dense enough to appear stronger in the image, I click on the eyeball spot again to again make the upper layer visible. I then create a mask for the upper image. I sometimes take the pen tool and trace out the mountain to select it by itself, making a path that will become a selection, but in any event, I use a black brush to paint out part of the upper layer and allow the lower layer to show through to some degree, or even 100%. If I think it needs more tweaking, I sometimes make a “soft light” layer above all the rest of the layers and darken appropriate areas. Once I am satisfied, I flatten the layers and resave it in a “retouched” folder with the same number. As you can see by the images above, it makes the mountain stand out, and it looks better than what the camera recorded to begin with.
– Gary Silverstein
Tags: enhance, enhancement, haze, mountain, pacific northwest, retouch, view, Washington
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