Another heavy filter job.
Whenever I “see” a photo, I see what I want the finished image to look like, even before I hit the shutter release. One of the reasons I’ve loved Lightroom so much is that it gets me to the image I saw before I shot it so much more quickly. I was hoping that I could get this image with Lightroom, but the Graduated filter requires some very creative maneuvering to get what the Tiffen software does (discussed here) in one pass.
This is one of my favorite shots ever using the 12-24mm super wide angle lens we got in 2008. Using the AV (Aperture Priority) mode, I think I struck the right balance in exposure and the deep focus I wanted as well as capturing the crashing wave in the foreground.
The workflow for this image: I did minor tweaks in Lightroom first where I fixed some sensor dust/lens dust, reduced the noise a tiny bit and played with some color saturation. Selected the “Photo > Edit in” menu to pull the adjusted image into Photoshop where I applied the filter and saved the image as a TIF file from Photoshop. After closing the image, Lightroom will pull the Photoshop edited image in and because I used TIF as a format, I was able to further dial some of the curve and color saturation levels without munging the image too badly.
I’ve got a bunch more work to do on the rest of the Mexico images, but I’m slugging away at them. Working on photos is relaxing for me. Very relaxing. Which is helping the mystery chest pain situation.
