California Fire

[yamo]

Folks,

Greetings. Looking out a particularly clean window on a flight from Orange County to San Jose, I snapped this shot of the eastern side of the Big Sur fire... and cleaned up the haze in Photoshop (more than a dozen curves layers to selectively adjust contrast, saturation boost).

D3 200f2 @ f/8 1/1250th ISO 200 shooting into the sun, The LR flat raw conversion (looked about like this to me except much brighter. LR has me about 1.75 stops underexposed... CNX sees it differently):

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The PSed version (CNX conversion) I never saw the detail with my eyes...

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By the way, my 32,000th shot with my D3 :wink:

Cheers,

-Yamo-

 

[spalding12]

wow....
that is some conversion
very hard to do... i'm sure

very well done done

 

[Bob Coutant]

Nice work Yamo. At first I didn't believe it, but then I tried a quick and dirty detail recovery on your resampled jpg file. Nothing as nice as your result, but the information surely is there:wink:.

 

[yamo]

Bob, Greg,

Thanks for the kind words... The processing is more time-consuming than difficult... just curves, curves and more curves... :wink:, er, and a little masking.

Cheers,

-Yamo-

 

[gvg45]

Superb job with the processing.

 

[antsplan]

Yes great job, nice shot.

 

[JohnSR]

Nice shot. Was heading down to Klamath Falls Oregon this week but found out thick smoke from the California is blowing up into southern Oregon so think I'll wait for the fall before going.

 

[Sanford504]

Excellent conversion. I envy those who can work with Photoshop and make it look so easy. I have been given PhotoShop Cs2 and Cs3 by my children and a Neice, and I've yet to master any but the simplest tasks. This is truly fantastic.

 

[yamo]

Greg, Anthony, John, Sanford,

Thanks to you all for the nice comments. The first time I've shot from a plane... pretty happy with what I got. I'll have to think about how to get up in the air without a distorted, often dirty piece of plastic in front of my lens. :wink:

Regarding PS... It's all in the curves.

Cheers,

-Yamo-

 

[sfoxjohn]

Bob, Greg,

Thanks for the kind words... The processing is more time-consuming than difficult... just curves, curves and more curves... :wink:, er, and a little masking.

Cheers,

-Yamo-

No "Shadow/highlights"?

 

[yamo]

No "Shadow/highlights"?

John,

Greetings. Shadow and highlights type of processing are handled nicely with curves with the blacks and whites input sliders (using show clipping to see where/if there is clipping). Or use the eyedroppers if that is to your liking.

For this image I increased contrast with a steep curve in specific tonal zones and masked the effect for the rest of the image. Repeat as necessary (as I said, maybe as many as a dozen such selective contrast adjustments for this image). Also some selective saturation adjustment was needed.

There is no better tool for this type of work than curves. IMO. of course. :wink:

Cheers,

-Yamo-

 

[RFCGRAPHICS]

You captured the raw power of the event. Very nicely done !

 

[ddietiker]

I wouldn't have guessed you could get these results from the original. Man, fires all over the west right now. The firefighters are stretched pretty thin.

 

[brooksro]

Nice process. I can't believe my eyes.

 

[scooptdoo]

its always satisifying bringing out the "picture" sometimes hidden in all the raw information.nice job!