Copyright Peter West Carey
It’s time to offer up another photo for your critique and edits. This month’s photo will have some variety, I’m sure. The finished product in this case ended up being a panoramic photo (above, click for original size), but there are many options for your cropping pleasures with the original file, found here(Warning: 12MB download). The original is a Canon RAW file from a 5D (.cr2) and should be openable in most versions of photo editing software. If not, here are two articles on DPS describing the freely distributed GIMP photo editing software and UFRaw, used to convert RAW images. As a member of the DPS community, you are free to download the photo and edit it anyway you wish, posting your results here for all to see. Please do not distribute the photo outside of DPS.
Along with posting your final edit, please also post a bit of the tale on how it came to be. Which program did you use and what kind of edits were needed? This type of critique is most valuable when there are more descriptions of what was changed so we can all learn from each other. I look forward to what your editing mind develops!!
In my case, I used Photoshop Lightroom 2.5 for my edits. The image was first ‘leveled’ and then cropped accordingly. I upped the exposure by half a stop (it was shot intentionally at -1 1/3 to help ensure the glaciers did not get blown out) and increased the contrast to +41. Highlight recovery was adjusted to +21 to bring just a bit of detail into the snow and ice while black clipping was set to +8 for a sharper feel. Clarity was moved to +45, Vibrance +24 and just a bit of sharpening. I used the Adjustment Brush to mask off the upper and right third of the blue sky and increase exposure by one stop. Lastly, I changed three colors’ luminance values: yellow +43, red +36 and green +36 to bring out colors in the flags.
(Note: the original photo will seem crooked when first viewed, but I assure you, it was shot level with the horizon but with sloping ground)
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