Wolf Tracks

[John Ippolito]

Wolf Tracks
Alaska Peninsula
D300, 17-55/2.8 @ 23mm, ISO 400, f10, 1/250, manual, Silver Efex Pro
I was guiding a fellow on a brown bear trip and came across these lovely fresh prints in wet sand near our camp.
The weather was wet, cool, and stormy about half of the ten days out, and I tried to capture the moodiness with the cooler conversion.

[peter delaney]

Hi John

You have a wonderful image on which to work on, I would like to know what you have actually done to image in Silver efex..as image seems to lacking contrast in FRG and too much contrast in BKG causing halos over the peaks... would love to see the colour version..

i would be tempted to clone out the human foot prints just from an aesthetic POV ...

but definitely a great image lots of mood and detail than can be brought out .. just needs a few tweeks..:S3:

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hey John,
I think the conversion was a great idea and I like the way the tracks lead you through the image. I have to agree with peter though as it also may be over sharpened. This one will shine with a bit of rework!

[Morkel Erasmus]

I have to agree John - a compelling image, would love to see the colour version just to see what you did and what "could be done"? :bg3:

[John Ippolito]

Peter, Roman, Morkel, thanks for your honest comments! Fishing for ideas. I must admit, the OP looks way overprocessed, especially here on the forum. It looks like it should be in OOTB.
Peter, I made so many experiments that I lost track.
I came back and fiddeled with this a few times over the last week to see what potential it has, but I need to get back to the RAW file and start from scratch. Here is a JPEG of the color version with not much of anything done beyond levels, I believe.

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hey John,
Yep......just get rid of the human tracks and let the B&W conversion begin again and this will shine!

[Andrew McLachlan]

Hi John, love the comp and the B&W version seems to have more impact, especially with the sand in the foreground. Agree with evicting the footprints.

[John Ippolito]

Reprocessed this one from the RAW file. Still not sure it has enough punch.
Removed the washed out remnants of what may have been my own prints. The subtle washed out tracks in the mid distance are from a brown bear.

[Morkel Erasmus]

Hi John...I came back to this one.

Your repost without the human tracks is nice, though I find the B&W a bit too grainy (I know it works in some cases, but in this one I can't put my finger on why it doesn't...I guess it makes it look like it lacked IQ out-of-camera). You last repost also lacks a bit of pure black and white for me - I find it too 'gray'...

Here's a quick one I did from your colour repost. Didn't remove the human tracks. Converted in Nik Silver Efex 2, applied red filter to the image to get a different kind of tone distribution. Added some Local Contrast Enhancement and finite sharpening.

What do you think?

[John Ippolito]

Hey Morkel, thanks for coming back to this one. I agree on the grainey, and gray look with the JPEG conversion(it looks worse than the TIF that I'm still not happy with). I like yours much better - and the red filter helps with tonality. Thanks!
I need to try this again from the RAW when I get a chance.