I think a person could spend many lifetimes exploring and photographing Oregon full-time and not even start to get close to experiencing all its most epic, and diverse beauty. I hope you get the chance to try! 😁
Gear:
Sony A7R2 (I shoot with the Panasonic Lumix S1R now, for those who have been asking)
Canon 11-24@11mm
f/10
1.0 second
50 ISO
I might have used the Wonderpana circular polarizer for this one (which I never use anymore).
Post-processing:
In Camera Raw, starting with a Linear Raw Profile (the real original file), I made a Custom Raw Profile (starting point) by applying a custom global gamma (brightening) curve mask (2.2), then a separate endpoint curve mask (locking in the white and black points without clipping), then a separate mid-tones curve mask, then lastly a separate global contrast mask with the saturation brought in a bit. With the heavy lifting easily done, this made the image nearly done before sliding even a single slider in Camera Raw! This was massively labor-saving and a noticeably huge leap in quality compared to any Adobe profile.
After finishing a few very subtle slight adjustments to the raw file in Camera Raw, I automatically applied all the same settings to another bracketed version taken at 1/60th of a second to stop the foliage movement. That one had a lot of noise and was originally quite dark. After matching the luminance of both files I brought the first (1-second exposure) into Photoshop as a lossless Raw Layer. The raw file was taken into DXO Photolab ONLY for their secret sauce noise reduction, then I exported that raw file into Photoshop onto the Raw Layer Stack. I applied a mask, and then brushed out the moving foliage, then rasterized (flattened) the image, and from there I did the fine-tuning and clean-up.
With the mega breakthrough of both totally lossless Raw Layer Editing (not Adjustment Layers or Smart Object Layers - which are destructive/degrading/damaging - but working in actual lossless Raw Layers) and starting from the original Linear Raw File and doing the most essential, influential, and powerful adjustments based specifically on an images very unique needs, what is possible today in terms of both labor-saving ease and quality is just astonishing!
Feb 28, 2023 at 06:58 PM
Previous versions of Mark Metternich's message #16182815 « Oregon Cascading »
