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Adhika Lie
02-01-2016, 11:46 AM
I have been on a ultra telephoto landscape spree the past few months. It's quite a refreshing sight in-betweens the nice ultra wide angle landscape shots. This one is the Three Peaks and the Liberty Mountain of the North Cascades as seen from the San Juan Island.

The water is blurred using the motion blur filter on Affinity Photo.



159201
600mm, f/8, 1/1250

Diane Miller
02-01-2016, 06:47 PM
I also love telephoto landscapes and I find this one very pleasing. Interesting light on the peaks -- looks like you brought some LA smog with you! But I wonder about bringing a bit more detail into the highlights and shadows on the mountains.

Just a thought -- I'm not sure -- but I wonder about darkening the water some.

Hope to see more of your work here! I should be kicked off for not having much to contribute.

Don Railton
02-01-2016, 11:35 PM
Hi Adhika
Nicely scene...:S3:

Mountains dont look as sharp, maybe diffraction/diffusion got you here? Also I think the processing has left black tips to the top of the trees, and i wonder if the fog/smog is also from processing or masking?? I like the scene and dont mind the water blurring, lovely light and i would welcome any more telescope landscapes..

DON

Adhika Lie
02-02-2016, 01:22 AM
Diane & Don,

Thanks for the kind words and inputs!

I played with darkening the water a little bit and yes, it worked really well! Thanks for that very thoughtful input, Diane.

Re: The smog, ugh yeah. The Pacific NW is very famous for its gloomy winter but from my experience in the past three years, the last week of December has always, always been clear with no cloud whatsoever in the sky; which is kinda frustrating for us landscape photographers. It's either a really dull gloomy sky with no colors or a dull boring cloudless sky. One thing that I have noticed though after a streak of clear sky (this one was after 3 days of clear sky) you can start seeing the smog. I am still beating myself up for not carrying my tripod that day during the excursion to the island. A few minutes after taking this shot, the sky started to turn pink like the alpine glow (It probably is called that), but it was just too hard to handhold at that time.

Your observation of the mountains being not completely sharp is correct, Don and I think there are two factors contributing to it. 1) There is probably not enough D-o-F at f/8 and 2) Diffraction. But knowing that the mountain is 100 miles away from where I shot this the heat could also be a contributor the the problem. I just want to go back and shoot this all over again with a tripod. :tinysmile_shy_t:

Thanks for pointing out about the poor work on the tree line. It's always the most difficult part of working on this type of images. At one point I gave up, I think. I hope the image embedded below is a slightly better attempt to smooth out those local adjustments! :t3


http://cdn.c.photoshelter.com/img-get/I0000da8DG8S5I4U/s/1200/I0000da8DG8S5I4U.jpg (http://adhika.photoshelter.com/image/I0000da8DG8S5I4U)


Just as an illustration how it looks like before the edit. Here is a thumbnail of what it was right after LR import.


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dankearl
02-04-2016, 01:13 PM
The mountains look good in the RAW photo. I would have just added a bit of contrast. Warming them up makes them look hazier than they are.

Diane Miller
02-04-2016, 04:50 PM
I would try a double-process to pull a little more detail out of the mountains, then overlay it in PS with the trees masked back to the original post. Caution about blowing whites. I think you can have detail and your lovely color both!

After doing the most with the raw, a touch of Nik Color Efex Pro's Detail Extractor might work wonders on the mountains. (And maybe some Clarity in LR). But what works for the mountains may not be best for the trees, so I'd probably go for masked layers.

Looking at your LR screenshot, you might try pulling the Whites slider back to 0 and going further to the ends with the Shadows and Highlights.

Adhika Lie
02-04-2016, 05:21 PM
Thanks for all of these good inputs. I tried pulling more detail (well contrast, really; there's not much detail per se in the mountains with it being OOF) from the mountains but I start running into tonality issue and it starts to look fake. I am not sure, maybe I could revisit this file again. I really need to try this Nik efex thing. It seems like a very good set of tools.

Diane Miller
02-05-2016, 12:33 PM
This is a very special image and is well worth revisiting. Just do what you can for the mountains and then composite that file with the one you have for the foreground, as layers in PS. It would be easy to mask with the well-defined treeline. And it should be easy to match the lovely color.

Stay away from "contrast" -- lower the overall exposure and then pull down Highlights to find any detail in the snow, and then pull Blacks down (left) to see what happens to the shadows on the mountains, then slightly right for Shadows to see if that helps. The try some Clarity, which might mean a light revision to the previous sliders. Then into PS for Nik's trickery (Color Efex Pro) -- Detail Extractor and/or possibly Pro Contrast or Tonal Contrast, used very sparingly. You can stack the three effects within one pass of CEP.

Andrew McLachlan
02-07-2016, 08:16 AM
A lovely scene which I think Dan summed up for me in that the RAW file looks good and perhaps too much post production taking away from the scene...if it were mine I would leave the moutains as they appear in the RAW file and rework the image file :)