Three more for consideration - one is a salvage job, curious what can be saved from it, others for play. Then I'll stop spamming y'all - don't want to hijack the forum, if someone else wants to continue, please do....and now:
The tones in your version remind me of what I think slide film might produce - Kaden would probably know...something in a cross-processing vein.
AuntiPode,
I like the darker foreground, I was never able to remove the haze from the volcanoes, at least to what I wanted it to be. It was a hot summer day with brilliant sunshine, great for viewing but a booger for my photographic skills.
It's more work, but with masking the foreground it's possible to make alterations strictly to the mountains. I felt the blue was an interesting effect, but the sky could also me masked to hold its blue while the mountains could be adjusted to a gray, for example. I confess to being lazy and shirking the work to play with proper masks.
About the tree and cast - that is a 'dust devil' that was making its way across the landscape - as you look at the series of frames the path is quite apparent
what specifically do you mean by "fringing and associated artifacts?" i could probably be more specific on how to avoid them if i know exactly what you mean.
that said, my workflow was pretty scatterbrained... i did it pretty fast. something to the effect of:
-fix/reduce overall color cast - slight move in curves layer set to color mode
-very slight shadow and highlights (much less than default settings)
-some channel blending (on another layer, set to luminosity mode)
-at some point i made a duplicate file, set that to Lab mode, used the b channel to quickly create a mask that only includes the parts of the image that are blue (the sky/mountains) i used that to darken the sky/mountains and make them more blue and less green/cyan
-at some point i made a flat composite layer, surface blurred it to eliminate the jpg crap in the sky, added noise to it, then used a mask so that it only affected the sky (not sure if this is what you meant by artifacts/fringing, but i'm guessing it wouldn't even be there in the original file, nor is it something you could do on every image - just in this case the sky is just a gradient more or less so it's possible)
-at some point i cloned out that ghosty looking thing around the middle tree (using 'darker color' mode)
-brought the image into Lab mode to increase color variation (using curves) within areas that the color would otherwise appear mostly all the same - see the brownish grass has areas of slight magenta and green, as well as yellow. the greenery has areas that are yellowish, areas that are more bluish, etc.
-i sharpened the image in Lab mode (just the L channel) i sharpened with both 'conventional' and 'hiraloam' sharpening, and adjusted opacity.
-save back to RGB
*note that you can also very effectively affect only certain parts of this particular image by using the "blend if" sliders, especially in Lab mode. let me know if you dont' know what this means. i know i did this at least once or twice for quick little color moves.
there may have been more here and there but that's the general gist of it as i remember. i left the artifacts in the mountains. i suppose one could go in and remove or reduce them, but i assume the original file does not even have that problem, so i didn't want to go spending a ton of time on something that wouldn't be too much of an issue in the orig file. i also only wanted to spend about 5-7 minutes on this, so that just wasn't possible. also, i think with the orig file, and some local retouching/masks, one could get a LOT more shadow detail out of the trees. i just didn't give it that much time.
does this help? if not, can you be more specific about the fringing and artifacts to which you are referring?
After rereading, perhaps 'halos' is a more appropriate term. In earlier attempts my tree edges always looked as if they were on steroids. Your PS skills far exceed mine, I need to study your workflow further. And other than the fact that both NX2 and LZ save the steps so as to not alter the original RAW file, I'd never be able to duplicate a given workflow for another image.
a lot of haloing comes from attempts to lighten the dark areas and darken the light areas. tools like shadow/highlight make halos. anything to do with HDR type effects will create halos. you have to use them carefully to avoid this.
also, anytime you sharpen anything, it creates halos. that's the way sharpening tricks your eyes into thinking something is sharper than it is - by adding a dark halo on the darker side of an edge, and adding a light halo on the lighter side of an edge. this is desirable in principle because if done right, it is effective at making it look sharper, but you need to be careful to avoid doing this to the point where it becomes noticeable/bothersome to someone not specifically looking for it. it's ok for halos to exist, just not to the point where an observer notices it and thinks the image looks "fake." FYI in the unsharp mask window, the 'radius' slider will control the size of the halos. the 'amount' slider will control the intensity of the halos. try setting 'amount' to 500, and messing around with radius. you'll see what i mean right away.
in the case of just a few halos that you find objectionable (but not a haloing problem over the whole image), as is often the case in images like this, with dark trees on a light sky, you can clone them out using the clone stamp tool set to "darker color" mode to eliminate the light haloing in the sky hugging the trees. i would do this on a new duplicate layer. try it, it's pretty handy.
if you have a halo problem over your whole image, you probably did something too heavily - either a shadow highlight type move or anything to do with HDR type looks will create crazy halos if not kept in check. also, high radius low amount (hiraloam - google it if you don't know what it is) can create bad halos too if you don't keep it in moderation.
in this image though i am betting it was just your trees and you could have fixed it with just a clone tool set to darker color mode. i made a quick example of this below. i purposely created some bad halos around the trees starting from the raw image (i applied shadow highlight and *too much* unsharp mask). you can see how it looks on the left. on the right, i started from the one on the left, and gave it literally no more then 30 seconds of the clone tool set to darken mode. as you can see, it is much improved. http://www.lemurofdoom.com/fm/haloFix.jpg
in this image though i am betting it was just your trees and you could have fixed it with just a clone tool set to darker color mode. i made a quick example of this below. i purposely created some bad halos around the trees starting from the raw image (i applied shadow highlight and *too much* unsharp mask). you can see how it looks on the left. on the right, i started from the one on the left, and gave it literally no more then 30 seconds of the clone tool set to darken mode. as you can see, it is much improved. ...Show more →
A big help - thanks. I tend to avoid CS3 but NX2 lacks this granularity of 'clone' functionality. Time to go study some more.
@papageno,
Thanks for the Pop-Photo pointer - I'll visit there too
yeah, i do basically everything in photoshop (aside from occasionally some outside noise reduction software), so any techniques i might suggest for you would be photoshop...
- don't want to hijack the forum, if someone else wants to continue, please do....and now:
