Waterfall with rainbow question

[jm0825]

How do you take a photo like this and get the rocks to lighten up, brighten or saturate the rainbow without blowing the highlights in the water. I can get the rainbow to pop in CS3 and keep the highlights in check but the rocks which were a tan color stay dark.

I did use a polarizer becuase of how bright it was.

How can I shoot this right the first time so I don't have to edit it, with the exception of my sensor dust

[Chip]

I'm no PP expert, but for a similar shot (snow and ice in the background instead of flowing water) I used (in GIMP) the lasso/free select tool to select just the rainbow and play with saturation, etc. for just that selection. Then you can either invert the selection to adjust all the other part of the photo, or deselect the rainbow to work on the whole thing at once. I'm sure there are other ways to do it, but this is the only way I know.

As for getting the shot right in camera, that's not easy. I you have time to shoot, try looking at your histogram after each shot and try to get an exposure where there's a lot of detail in the highlights section of the histogram, but nothing is blown out/clipping in that same highlight section. Or, failing that, take a series of gradually lighter or darker exposures. One of them will likely be close.

My guess is that it's very hard with a dSLR to get - in camera - both the rainbow as saturated as what we see with our eyes and the highlights now blown out. I suspect that the camera's dynamic range just isn't that high.

If I'm off the mark on any of these, I trust that someone will correct me.

That's a gorgeous spot. Where is it?

[jm0825]

This was taken at Shoshone Falls in Twin Falls Idaho. I took some shots last year on a sunny day and had a very good rainbow, but due to a new hard drive dying I lost a lot of photos. Including one like this. So I wanted to get it again. The day was a partly cloudy day and a bit windy so the light was changing all the time making it difficult to get the shot I wanted.

Because the rainbow is transparent how do I avoid picking up the background? I wonder if I cut the rainbow to another layer, then brighten it up and used the patch tool in an additive mode if that would do it?

[AoxoA]

Masking and adjusting for the rock in the foreground is probably the easiest adjustment in this photo. The best way would be to shoot this on a tripod and bracket. You would need to have the scene lit in a lower dynamic range setting to be able to capture it all in a single shot, but that would probably mean no rainbow.

But bringing in an adjustment layer with the foreground rock correctly exposed would be faily simple. It's an easy mask.

AoxoA

[dseymour]

Here's my attempt. You can use it as a guide to learn if you wish.

I duplicated it, I used the clone stamp to get id of the filter edge in the top right, set the layer to overlay, masked out the rocks and some water that was blown out, and merged all layers. I then duplicated the layer again and set it to soft light and lowered the opacity. Then I took a vibrance adjustment and made the colors on the rainbow stand out.

I think this would look good in a photomatix HDR.

[kencaleno]

I applied HDR to get this result: