March 12, 2004
Vicente Flats, 2003
It's a bright day in mid-May. After a easy climb up the ridge line along the ocean, the trail meanders back among the trees, getting us closer to our campground for the night. Along the way, we stop to snack and rest a bit.
The air is warm and sun filters through the trees, leaves and light shifting with the breeze. You can hear birds chirping, and a creek softly in the distance.
full sized version
Soon, soon, I can go backpacking again.
Read the extended entry for details about the photo.
So, this one was a bear to correct. If you look at the original version, you'll eventually notice several things I had to fix.
First off, I didn't handle the scene's dynamic range correctly. The tree trunks were nearly black, and the sky was pegged at the top end. I'm not sure what I could have done to fix this, other than multiple exposures. Normally, adjusting for the brightest part of the scene works for me (as the rest can be pulled back out with contrast masking), but something went a little haywire here.
Next, digital cameras lie. Well, they all lie, but the current crop of digitals more than film. In particular, they have to interpolate missing color data to make a full scene. This article has a graphic to explain what's going on. Anyway, because of this, my Olympus will occasionally generate chromatic aberration at sharp contrast boundaries. It's, y'know, annoying. Especially as the color aberration shows up as 1992 IBM PC Magenta <shudder>. Cleaning up this part took, by far, the longest amount of time. Enough that I'm thinking I should learn how to script the Gimp to automatically correct those spots. Or just break down and buy a Foveon based camera.
Lastly, the shot got the standard pass of an unsharp mask to tighten it up.
Because of all the manipulation for the chromatic junk, it's inappropriate for anything but wallpaper. But oh what nice wallpaper :-).
Posted by Ray at March 12, 2004 09:14 AM | TrackBack