Sleeping Giant

[Dave (Isle of Skye)]

From a few days ago.

Dave 

[muntanela]

Is he snoring?

[Dave (Isle of Skye)]

Is he snoring?

Yes, very much so 

Dave

[Paulo Bizarro]

Good one.

[Tony Jay]

Extraordinary!

Tony Jay

[SanderKikkert]

Nice one Dave, Best Regards, Sander

[luxborealis]

As usual, well seen and captured, Dave.

You seem to have given it a "treatment" to make it seem like an etching as opposed to a photograph. Is it "over"sharpening? high clarity? both? neither? At this small size, it's hard to tell, but it is interesting and might just grow on me.

[Dave (Isle of Skye)]

As usual, well seen and captured, Dave.

You seem to have given it a "treatment" to make it seem like an etching as opposed to a photograph. Is it "over"sharpening? high clarity? both? neither? At this small size, it's hard to tell, but it is interesting and might just grow on me.

Hi Terry,

Sorry it has taken me a while to get back to you  

I have just looked at the time stamp on the file and apparently I worked on this image for around 3 hours give or take, so I did quite a few things to it, but to answer your question as best I can, as I seem to work every image differently, but I did pass it through ACR twice, once without any changes just to convert to a tiff, other than removing any CA etc. I then passed the RAW through ACR a second time to significantly bring down the highlights and bump up the detail in the shadows to make a second low contrast flat version. I then stacked the two version as layers and blended them back together by hand with a variety of masks. I also ran a duplicate of the the low contrast version through a high pass sharpening layer and moved only the darker and now more detailed areas onto another new layer, so it was sharper and lighter in the darks but had no effect on the highlights. I then went back and used the low contrast layer again to control and then smooth out the highlights with luminosity masks. Then I used both curves and levels to tweak it and to bring out the mid tone contrast, which I again blended back into the image with masks.

I try to work an image slowly tweak by tweak to gently move it to towards the end result with lots of version saves, which I can then go back to if I have dropped a clanger, but which I then usually delete after a day or so to save space.

I have also found if I work on a layer and do what I think looks about right, then make myself pull the layer back down to about 50% opacity even though only a minute before I thought it looked OK, it seems to work out much better in the long run.

I also did all the usual stuff like spot removal and any other artefacts I could see at 300% etc.

Hope this goes some way to answering your question  

Dave

[Walt Roycraft]

I have also found if I work on a layer and do what I think looks about right, then make myself pull the layer back down to about 50% opacity even though only a minute before I thought it looked OK, it seems to work out much better in the long run.

Dave

I find this to be true as well.

[Chris Calohan]

I've found an approach if you use NIK's SEP2 that works quite nicely.

Once I do my normal tonal adjustments in ACR, I open it into PS and make a B&W Conversion Layer Adjustment so I can place my colors where I want. In this sample, I wanted more detail in the palmettos and less emphasis on the left side tree, allowing the fog to work to my advantage instead of fighting it. Once I had the colors where I wanted (Demo 1), I flattened the image, saved and  reopened the orginal ACR adjusted file in PS and brought that file into SEP2 where I only made a Full Dynamic Harsh adjustment with the yellow filter to give a tad more emphasis on the highlights in the palmettos (Demo 2). Lastly, I did one more new SEP with only the Neutral setting but pulling the structure down to -100 and adding a slight bump on the contrast.

Flattening the last setting, I copied that file and placed it atop the first demo file, added a layer mask using three brushes starting at 33, 66, 100% progressively working from left to right (at 100%) to feather in the details where I wanted them strong, an leaving the "fog" to drift the BG out. Atop this I added the first file and again using progressive brushes on a layer mask, I blended in the harder details where they were important and blended out the rest as I felt the scene called for. I did adjust the brushes more than the 33-100 at times as needed.

The advantage to this method is that the whole edit (demo 3) only took 20 minutes.

[Dave (Isle of Skye)]

I've found an approach if you use NIK's SEP2 that works quite nicely.

Once I do my normal tonal adjustments in ACR, I open it into PS and make a B&W Conversion Layer Adjustment so I can place my colors where I want. In this sample, I wanted more detail in the palmettos and less emphasis on the left side tree, allowing the fog to work to my advantage instead of fighting it. Once I had the colors where I wanted (Demo 1), I flattened the image, saved and  reopened the orginal ACR adjusted file in PS and brought that file into SEP2 where I only made a Full Dynamic Harsh adjustment with the yellow filter to give a tad more emphasis on the highlights in the palmettos (Demo 2). Lastly, I did one more new SEP with only the Neutral setting but pulling the structure down to -100 and adding a slight bump on the contrast.

Flattening the last setting, I copied that file and placed it atop the first demo file, added a layer mask using three brushes starting at 33, 66, 100% progressively working from left to right (at 100%) to feather in the details where I wanted them strong, an leaving the "fog" to drift the BG out. Atop this I added the first file and again using progressive brusheds on a layer mask, I blended in the harder details where they were important and blended out the rest as I felt the scene called for. I did adjust the brushes more than the 33-100 at times as needed.

The advantage to this method is that the whole edit (demo 3) only took 20 minutes.

Nice image Chris and very moody  

Isn't it weird, that we seem to instinctively or subconsciously know where we are going with an image, without actually knowing what the outcome will be until we see it.

I think photographing and then post processing an image, is akin to playing a musical instrument, where the more you do it, the more you begin to realise, that you are doing it without having to think about what it is that you are actually doing - a bit like jamming or riffing on a guitar you could say. Which might also lead into why many photographers have also played, or continue to play musical instruments. Perhaps it's the same part of the brain we are using or something.

Dave

[Chris Calohan]

Agreed, Dave only I can't play doddley squat but I can tell you which piccolo in a full orchestra is a half register too high or low. I can hear perfect pitch. Doesn't seem fair. I only hope my photography makes up for a lack of musical skill. In my demonstration reply, I forgot to tell you how much I enjoyed the image. Sorry, it really is quite splendid.