Namibiascape

[Lorant Voros]

I'm "homesick" for Africa and looking at photos from last year's trip. Here is one from a river tour we did in Namibia. I posted another image from this are a wile ago, but I like this one too with the quiver tree. I had to reduce the jpeg quality big time to fit into the 200kb limit. Hope it still works for the viewers. Comments are welcome.

7D
17-40mm
ISO200
F:10
1/320

99017

[Robert Amoruso]

Lorant,

I like the overall composition with the tree balanced on left with rock outcropping on right. BG pleasing with right amount of sky. Tree also balances well with peak in right BG.

A couple of things I wanted to try so decided to post the results. Though the differences may not readily be noticable, once you do them and toggle on an off, it is very noticeable.

1) Opened up shadows in PS using Shadows/Highlights adjustment - aggressively opened up shadows, filled mask with black, painted white on dark shadows in rocks (though I was rather sloppy so you can see places it bleeds over) and painted gray on the shadow on the BG peak on right.
2) Luminosity Mask to intensify colors (method below). In high contrast situations like this I will use this method to product a more pleasing, at least to me, image.



Highlight selection:

1) Channels palette.
2) Ctrl key and click the RGB channel. Photoshop will now create a feathered selection around highlight pixels in the image. Photoshop has selected pixels based on how bright they are. Pure white pixels are selected 100%. Pure black pixels are not selected and pixels falling in-between those two extremes are selected based on a percentage of how close they are to white.

Adjustment:

1) Go back to layer palette - you will see selection.
2) Create BG copy.
3) Create mask on the BG copy from the selection.
4) Selection is grayscale shaded.
5) Change blending mode to Multiply.
6) Adjust opacity.

[Dave Mills]

Hi Lorant, great tutorial by Robert above. Roberts adjustments added a richer color but most important added depth to the image. Not much more to add with a good job on the image and repost!!

[dankearl]

Nice repost, Robert,
Nice photo with a nice composition, Lorant.

[Rachel Hollander]

Lorant - I like the comp. and Robert's repost takes it up a level. I hope to make it to Namibia in the near future.

TFS,
Rachel