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I'm titling this image "Hilltop Dawn."
This was shot in very low light, with a two-second exposure -- obviously, on a
tripod. Even then, it was shot at ISO 320, which resulted in considerable
noise. The color was actually pretty close to what you see now -- what
vibrant colors do you expect when it's nearly pitch-black out?
The exposure of this shot was pretty good to begin with, because I took about
eight shots at different aperture and shutter speeds to assure I had an exposure
that was good. I didn't have to do any work to bring out shadows or
highlights. But there was some work on the color, and quite a bit of
intricate work to remove noise.
I spent about 45 minutes on this shot in
Photoshop.
I started by working on the color. It was a
bit more orangey-yellow at the start, so I worked to give it a sepia tone via some color correction.
I had a really hard time getting the color I wanted without the green of the
grass starting to come through, but I eventually settled on something that
didn't require me to start ripping into the image and blocking-off the shadows
and mid-tones in order to make adjustments on the grass by itself. To remove
noise, I started with
Bert's Noise Reduction Action. It wasn't a lot of help here, but it's
hard for a tool to handle as much noise as this shot had, without blowing away
the finer details of the tress. So next, I blocked-off the sky with the
lasso tool, and ran a Gaussian blur. Pretty good results, so I moved on to
blurring the sky around the tree and horizon by hand. I did a little bit
of work with the clone tool in the foreground, just to clean up some stray
pixels that cropped up somewhere during the process. A little unsharp-mask
to finish,
and presto!
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Camera: Olympus E-10
Mode: Program
Metering: Center-weighed Average
Shutter Speed: 2 sec
Aperture: f3.2
ISO: 320
Focal Length: 15mm
Contrast and Sharpness were set to normal.
Original File Size: 2240 x 1680, 2,440K at 1/4 Compression
The camera was fitted with a Hoya HMC UV(0) filter.
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