Beautiful Colorful Vivid Rocky Seascape

[PhotoExtremist]

This was taken on a beach in California, it's a 25 second exposure taken at dawn when the sun was below the horizon (if I remember correctly). I used an ND8 filter on my lens. ND filters are just filters that dim down the light coming into your DSLR. This allows you to increase the shutter speed significantly. For this picture it was 25 seconds long at F22. The waves were going in and out of the rocks during the 25 seconds, which is why they look kinda 'ghosty' and foggy.

I exposed for the FOREGROUND and NOT the sky. I completely replaced the sky in Photoshop because the sky that was really boring. After that I corrected the Levels of the foreground, and dodged the Mid-tones on the rocks with Protect-Tones on (this conserves the saturation)

After replacing the sky and dodged the rocks, I added a faint white gradient on the horizon to make the picture have more atmosphere. Then, I flattened the image and selected the entire canvas, right click and hit Free-Transform, right click again and hit Warp. Then I bent the edges down.

Increase the saturation a little bit, maybe mess around with the hue/saturation sliders, and maybe as some very mild HDR toning.

Resize, add URL at top, Save as...

[Icelily]

What a beautiful pic! Thank you for sharing!!

[statichash]

Great photo, and thanks for walking us through the process of creating the image.

[pmed20]

really cool pic! thanks for sharing.

[pjflan7]

fascinating creation and excellent pp.

[YoMoe]

Wow that is an amazing photo. Your tutorial sounds pretty easy. I don't live anywhere where they would have rocks like that - have you tried it with a regular landscape shot? Would it work?

[naeno]

Excellent work. Well done!

[PhotoExtremist]

Originally Posted by YoMoe

Wow that is an amazing photo. Your tutorial sounds pretty easy. I don't live anywhere where they would have rocks like that - have you tried it with a regular landscape shot? Would it work?

If you mean using an ND filter and replacing the sky, then absolutely. here is an example by P0RG, he had the shutter speed long and that is why the grass looks soft. I don't know if he replaced the sky or not.