Ok, as far as processing went, here were my steps. I added the before/after to see where I started. If you want to see the image after every step please hop over to my blog.
The first order of business was to find a crop that I liked. 3 photo stitches from a 17mm TS will give you a 4x5 ratio. Sometimes I simply go with it, sometimes I don't, it all depends on the image. In this particular case I knew the image would benefit from a longer vertical because it had lines travelling from top to bottom, so I went with a 5x7.
The 2nd step was to clone out the lights. I left the light pollution that was spilling in from behind the mountain, but the highway ones had to go.
At this point I started moving the image towards what I had in my mind's eye. The Northern Lights that I witnessed were cool, with accents of red. What the camera captured was a different thing altogether. I opened Viveza and cooled down the entire image. I painted back the reds from the original image since the cooling down had some effect on them too.
In ACR I opened the lights quite a bit in order to get some life back into the image, and then added clarity to help the Aurora and the stars stand out.
A bit of dodge and burn on a b/d layer brought back the Milky Way and the shooting star. The sky was pretty much done now.
For the foreground I spent some time dodging (this time in LAB so I can have better control on what gets touched) the wisps of water on and around the rocks. I finished up with saturation and mid-tones contrast.
bvais wrote:
I admit it's a bit un-orthodox, but that's how I roll :-D
I don't think it's unorthodox. . It reads very straightforward and made sense to me. . It's nice to see someone else using Viveza. . It's an integral part of my workflow.
@Travis Viveza is indeed a powerhouse. I tried out different plugins, and the results I get from Viveza surpass the other ones by a mile. Even the simple algorithms for exposure or contrast give better results than PS/ACR/LR.
bvais wrote:
@Travis Viveza is indeed a powerhouse. I tried out different plugins, and the results I get from Viveza surpass the other ones by a mile. Even the simple algorithms for exposure or contrast give better results than PS/ACR/LR.
The entire NIK suite is like that... I couldn't live without it now.
